Microsoft beefs up Business Intelligence in Office 12

Improvements designed to help information workers find, analyse and share business information

Microsoft today said that it has "significantly increased and broadened" its investment in business intelligence (BI) with the development of a business performance management server, and attempts to ramp up the BI capabilities within its forthcoming Office 12.

The software giant promised that Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 will be available in November.

In addition it will showcase technologies that will be included in the next release of Office designed to help information workers find, analyse and share business information.

Where BI has previously lived outside business processes, it can now be a part of all the structured and unstructured processes that occur in Office, according to Microsoft.

"Although the BI market has experienced a 17 per cent compound annual growth rate over the past 10 years to reach $4.3bn in worldwide software revenue, the vendors' primary focus has been on analysts and power users," said Dan Vesset, research director for analytics and data warehousing at IDC.

"During this period, Excel has remained the most widely used end-user tool for BI, but it has lacked the control needed for supporting enterprise-class decision making and compliance processes.

"By integrating new BI functionality into Office and ensuring Office connectivity to the SQL Server platform, Microsoft has the potential to broaden the use of BI by business users and provide IT staff with greater control over deployment and maintenance of the BI platform."

Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, added: "One way to increase the impact that people can have in an organisation is to give them access to the information they need.

"Until now, BI software has been too complex, costly and disconnected from the software tools people use every day to do their jobs.

"But the investments we're making in Microsoft Office, from significant extensions in existing products such as Office Excel and SharePoint Products and Technologies, to new server investments such as the Office Business Scorecard Manager, will make BI and the business insights gleaned from it more pervasive. "

Available from 1 November Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 is a server-based business score-carding application. It uses the Microsoft Office System and extends the SQL Server platform to help organisations deploy personalised scorecards to employees to track key performance indicators against goals.

With an estimated retail price of $5,000 for the server, and a client access licence of $175 per user, Microsoft claimed that Business Scorecard Manager is a "fraction of the cost" of comparable score-carding solutions.

Beefed up BI capabilities in Office 12 and Excel will allow users to more securely access, analyse and share information from data warehouses and enterprise applications by maintaining a persistent connection between the spreadsheet and the data source.

Newly developed Office features include complete support for SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, expanded spreadsheet capacity, improved sorting and filtering capabilities, rich data visualisation schemes, and enhanced PivotTables and PivotCharts.

Server-side Excel capabilities, called Excel Services, will allow customers to share and manage spreadsheets on the server and allow them to be viewed via a web browser or downloaded to the desktop.

The new Office technologies build on the BI platform capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server. Microsoft will launch the next version of its SQL Server database, SQL Server 2005 (along with Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006) on 7 November.