While at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, I attended a session on building advanced dashboards with SharePoint PerformancePoint services for 2010.

Overall the demo was good but will say the product has a very Data and BI centric UI. at first you might say “of course it does” but if Microsoft wants this product to be used more widely there needs to be less jargon (Facts, Targets, Formula editing (with no online help) and so on. I think this is a great product and the new features are great but would really like to see a much improved UI.

Below is a summary of the key new features in the product:

- No longer (according to claims) requires knowledge of writing MDX queries)

- 1-click publishing of dashboards to SharePoint

- Works with data also being displayed on the screen and allows for in-line editing of data (very nice!)

- Pretty much everywhere you go in the product, there are live previews of the data. This was a major hindrance in past versions because you really never got to see if the data was correct until you fully published the dashboard.

- if you don’t want to use PerformancePoint’s dashboards you can just publish the KPI’s, charts, etc. To manuay build the page you can go to the new SharePoint BI Center and you can build a web part page (they demonstrated editing the page but suppose SharePoint Designer would work too)

-Bill