Pro PerformancePoint Server 2007 is Microsoft's latest product in its line of business intelligence applications, a piece of software that gathers data from corporate databases and delivers it to an end user in a friendly, graphical fashion. PerformancePoint offers the next step in the digitization world. Businesses now have gigabytes upon terabytes of data in databases; there's a need to interpret the data and glean key business insights from it and PerformancePoint.

Author Philo Janus walks you through the business process management and architecture of the PerformancePoint product before delving into developing a complete business intelligence solution, from start to finish.

Philo Janus is a senior technology specialist with Microsoft. Over the years, he has presented InfoPath to thousands of users and developers, and assisted with enterprise implementations of InfoPath solutions. With that background, he is particularly sensitive to the difficulties users and developers have had with InfoPath. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering in 1989 to face a challenging career in the U.S. Navy. After driving an aircraft carrier around the Pacific Ocean and a guided missile frigate through both the Suez and Panama canals, and serving in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, a small altercation between his bicycle and an auto indicated a change of career (some would say that landing on his head in that accident would explain many things). Philo's software development career started with building a training and budgeting application in Access 2.0 in 1995. Since then, he's worked with Oracle, Visual Basic, SQL Server, and .NET building applications for federal agencies, commercial firms, and conglomerates. In 2003, he joined Microsoft as a technology specialist evangelizing Office as a development platform.