As cool as PerformancePoint is...

As cool as PerformancePoint is... it's not here yet. So, you're probably still putting Office Business Scorecard Manager in production for new projects right now. If you're building multidimensional or multilingual scorecards, you're probably already running Update Rollup 4 for Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (August 28, 2006) on top of your servers. If you're building parameter-linked scorecards, you'll already know why.

If you haven't noticed anything amiss in your scorecards running on anything between RTM and Update Rollup 3, you might want to read the KB articles that describe all four rollups to see if there's anything in there that you might like.

But... if you're delivering new implementations that may collide with the new version of SharePoint, you'll want to be aware of the "compatibility release for Business Scorecard Manager 2005" (as it's called on the Microsoft Support website) which addresses some MOSS 2007 issues and includes all four previous rollups.

However, it's a little confusing because Support seems to indicate that you have to call Premier Support for the CR... but MSDN appears to list the same bits as "Business Scorecard Manager with Service Pack 1" under Applications\Business Scorecard Manager. The installer reports itself to be "Compatibility Release." MSDN reports a release date of 20070127.

Since I can't speak for anyone but me... I'm hoping that a clarifying article will be published soon to help those of us in the trenches sort it all out.

[No, the scorecard server is still prevented from installing on Vista for reasons that are above my pay grade, but the scorecard builder does install and run on Vista just fine. Because it's very order sensitive, be sure to carefully read the steps for installing the scorecard server with SQL Server 2005!]