Project Gemini is by enabling users of Office, especially Excel, to do their own BI analyses without IT's handholding. It is still targeted for release in the first half of 2010, with public betas coming in the second half of this year, Weismantel said.

PerformancePoint Server, after just 15 months, is doing better since the move.

Microsoft has recently signed up three major corporations to use PerformancePoint, considered part of the sub-genre of Business Performance Management (BPM) software.

They include cosmetics vendor The L'Oreal Group, Twinkies maker Interstate Bakeries Corp., and a Fortune 25 manufacturer that Weismantel declined to name.

Tying PerformancePoint to SharePoint by making the former free to enterprise customers of the latter is an "obvious vehicle" to boost PerformancePoint's usage, he said. SharePoint has more than 100 million licensed users.