Book: Rational Guide to Monitoring and Analyzing with PerformancePoint Server 2007

Christmas came early last week when a copy of the First PPS book to be published dropped through our letter box – Thanks Nick and Adrian 🙂

For those of you aren’t familiar with Rational Guides the format is designed to get you up and running with a product rather than be an in-depth technical reference and this is exactly what the authors achieve with this book.  I suspect that Nick wrote the majority of this book whilst Adrian will have more focus on the upcoming companion book

Following the introduction the book is split into:

• Installation and Configuration;
• The elements (a chapter on each of the core dashboard elements); and
• Implementation and Management (Deploying and securing PPSM)

and flows nicely from one chapter to the next with writing at a suitable level – not ridiculously technical and not condescending.  The KPI chapter I found particularly useful as this is one of the deeper areas of PPSM.

Whilst not wanting to sound like a free advert, this is an excellent book for getting started and reaching a good level with PPS M&A.  If you are looking for a hardcore technical guide to PerformancePoint then:

a) other than what’s on technet, it doesn’t exist yet!; and

b) this isn’t it.

Having said that, the authors point out a number of quirks, bugs and pitfalls of PPS M&A that you might never find out otherwise.  Definitely a recommended read for anyone who wants to get up and running with PPSM

One thing to note is that although ProClarity is marketed as the “Analyze” component of PerformancePoint it is not covered in this book – that’s easily a book in itself!