PerformancePoint Lives!

During the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago, Bill Baer delivered the first public details on the inner workings of SharePoint 2016. He was discussing how non-Office 365 services were implemented in SharePoint 2016, and made the following statement:

“For capabilities such as PerformancePoint Services, we have brought those services forward into SharePoint 2016 by back porting them into the product itself.”

This is quite significant as it represents the first time that any statement has been made about PerformancePoint by someone at Microsoft in quite some time. There has been a fair bit of speculation as to whether the product would even be included in SharePoint 2016, for example here, here, and here. This statement should clear up any confusion for those heavily invested in PerformancePoint as to whether they will be supported into the new release. You can see it for yourself below, and if you can, I recommend watching the entire session – Bill did a great job. The PerformancePoint statement occurs at about 9:50.

However, just because it will be there, doesn’t mean that it has a bright shiny future. I suspect that it is being included for compatibility reasons only so that those with PerformancePoint can move forward to SharePoint 2016. In terms of new features, I believe that PerformancePoint, much like InfoPath is a dead end. Time will of course tell.