Next Steps

Now that the police service's employees can see their performance on the scorecard, they are likely to want the ability to drill down from the high-level information shown on the Web page down to the detail level information that relates to them. One of the ways in which the scorecard solution can be extended is to use drillthrough on the reports, as shown in Chapter 6, so that they can click on a KPI value or chart section and open a detail report.

Microsoft Office Tools for Scorecards

In addition to using Excel and Windows SharePoint Services, a few other tools in the Office family are useful for building scorecards.

Business Scorecard Manager

In this chapter, we have shown how you can build an effective scorecard using a combination of Analysis Services, Reporting Services, and WSS. The one drawback with the approach we took is that it requires the builder of scorecards to have expertise in each of the technology areas to deliver a full solution.

Microsoft has released a product called Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager that is intended to bridge the gap between the users and the scorecards. It is designed to allow people working within the business to create, manage, and use scorecards using Office and SharePoint technologies that they are already familiar with. Customers embarking on scorecard projects or who have a long-term vision for scorecards should take a look at this product.

FrontPage

Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 (and the upcoming Office SharePoint Designer 2007) is now fully integrated with Windows SharePoint Services, so you can directly edit a WSS site from within the FrontPage graphical editor. This allows you to have much more control over the site compared with using the Modify Shared Page option within the Web site. For example, you can edit the page areas outside the web parts and define new zones for dropping web parts.

2007. Microsoft Office System

The next release of Office will have some new features that make it easier to create BI dashboards that include dynamic KPIs, information from Excel workbooks, and Reporting Services reports.

Supporting Multiple Languages with Analysis Services

If you have users with different languages, you can define translations in Analysis Services cubes that will be used when a client application connects to the database with a specific locale. Text such as captions or display folder names, as well as dimension and member names, can all have translations for various languages associated with them.