EPM 2007 – Working with Excel Services and Dashboards

If you have not had the opportunity to work with Excel Services, SQL Reporting Services (SRS) and Dashboards in the new Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution you are REALLY missing out.

In order to work with Excel Services you MUST have MOSS – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 installed. For some basic info on Excel Services, please go here.

I recommend using both SRS and Excel Services to create Dashboard views in Project Server.
Here are a couple of snapshots of views created using the Demo Virtual PC (VPC) from Microsoft. *Note these are pictures of one single dashboard with some additional Report Web parts.

The Key Performance Indicator web part above was done by Microsoft folks and is a SRS web part added into the Dashboard.

Bringing these Business Intelligence (BI) technologies together with the other capabilities of the EPM Solution REALLY gives amazing power to the clients. Just remember – Garbage in reaps Garbage out.

In a few future articles I hope to post on the steps to work with EPM and MOSS and the steps to create Excel Services and SRS Dashboard Views.