I wish I had a crystal ball to predict the future. If I had one, I could have saved myself a whole lot of stress and frustration over this whole PPS thing in the first place.

That being said, I do think Monitoring and Analytics is something that Microsoft will be working with in the future. Microsoft is committed to B.I., but they are not committed to CPM as they will freely admit. I think PPS M&A is coming along nicely and am excited about what it will offer next year along with the release of Gemini. A lot of partners got burned and are confused or worried about making a wrong decision again, so I am not surprised your partner might be pushing back.

If you think about it, you already own the software since you have the SharePoint E-cal. Your costs are just time and services from a partner if you need them. You might want to pursue a pilot project of PPS in SharePoint and see how you like it.

As for the 2010 migration, I am told everything will move over from the current environment. My actual believe will be to expect about 80% to come over without problem, 15% to need to be tweaked somehow and about 5% to have to be recreated.

I’m wondering what MSoft’s strategy is for PPS 2007 going forward. The partner that I work with said they don’t want to start any PPS projects since they are concerned about support from MS. we just purchased SharePoint enterprise CAL’s which gave us access to PPS and ProClarity, and now our partner is pushing back from us implementing this solution.

Is there any reason NOT to install and implement PPS 2007? I understand MS is going to include this functionality into SharePoint 2010 but I really don’t want to wait that long since I think PPS is a great tool, but I also don’t want to waste a lot of time and $$ implementing a solution that will ‘go away’ so to speak.

Do you have any info regarding this strategy for PPS and the transition to SharePoint 2010?

thanks
Mark

The document, http://alanwhitehouse.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/ve_sales_data_map.doc is not currently available for download. Would it be possible to have it re-uploaded?

Kinds Regards,
Rob

Tough for me to say without knowing your actual design. However, it all comes down to how far into the future you were entering budget and forecast data last year. So in 2008, if you entered data into the Budgeting or Forecast scenarios for 2009, 2010, 2011, etc., then if you go into the system today and select/use those scenarios for the next budgeting round you will find that they currently have last year’s values in them. So you will either need to clear the data out of them, or if you want to keep them for use in reporting, then I would suggest you create new scenarios (i.e., prior period budget, prior period forecast, etc.) and use a backend rule to move last year’s data into them.

I hope this helps.

To “fake” a demo of Virtual Earth is pretty easy. All your data resides in the XML file (georss) that can be manually edited. That is what we do for mock-ups and demos. In real life it takes a little more work as you need to map your data and use programing to create the file automatically.

Visio is also an option. It is easier to map your data from a SQL database, cube or from a PPS scorecard, however you lose all the zoom in, zoom out, move around functionality.

I think the choice comes down how the end uses need to interact with the map data. I think the Visio is a good simple choice for quick views in a map type format, Virtual Earth gives you the most flexibilty and power, but is more complex to setup and in a commercial environment, each use carries a price due to the licensing structure.

Good luck.