Microsoft Speeds BI with Two New Accelerators

From E-Week: Microsoft Speeds BI with Two New Accelerators introduces the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator, which seeks to help you "visualize and manage scorecards and strategies across your organization with speed and precision." The BI accelerators have received some very poor reviews, especially the Sarbanes Oxley one.

Probably a little more interesting is the Excel Add-in for Analysis Services. It makes building drillable views into a cube fairly straightforward, and lets you leverage the graphing capabilities of Excel with cube data. It still requires you know what you are doing, and it's not as straightforward to use as a tool like Databeacon, but it's a great free add-on.