I'm obviously getting a bit tardy in my old age, as I meant to do this last week when the news came out (29/03/2007). Shocking I know.
Anyway if you haven't signed up to the beta newsgroups yet, here is the 'goodie' list for Monitoring and Analytics in CTP2.
Dashboards
· Thin Dashboard Consumer. Provides the user experience of thin analytic dashboards created in Dashboard Designer.
· Publish to SharePoint. Allows users to publish dashboards to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
· Preview. Provides dashboard preview capabilities from Dashboard Designer before publishing to SharePoint.
Dashboard Designer
· Dashboard Designer. Allows users to assemble views and filters from the catalog into a dashboard.
· Filters (parameterization). Provides a definition and framework for accepting and passing filters among the scorecards and views within dashboards.
· Analytic View Designer. Provides create and configure capabilities inside Dashboard Designer for analytic chart and grid views. For CTP2, this is limited to an MDX text box with preview and filter capabilities.
· Scorecard Editor. Provides an enhanced scorecard build experience, including cut, copy and paste, right click, hide rows, and MDX expression capabilities.
Report Types
· Strategy Maps. Provides an enhanced strategy map build experience, including additional stencils and shapes.
· Thin OLAP Charts. Provides space-efficient bar and line charts of Analysis Services 2005 queries for dashboards.
· Thin OLAP Grids. Provides space-efficient HTML tables of Analysis Services 2005 queries for dashboards.
As you can see this all sounds like big chunks of Proclarity Dashboard Server and Analytics Server functionality being added which can only be a good thing.
Current estimated arrival time has moved from mid-March (obviously) to early April. When I know more, you'll know more 