PerformancePoint Insider

Microsoft Surface Business Intelligence

Patrick Husting — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:00:00 GMT

This was shown at the BI Conference on the 3rd day. They used a Surface table unit and demonstrated what business intelligence might look like on a touch table. It is not a PerformancePoint Scorecard or chart, but it looks good....

Kind of fun to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbtc_PZOjs

Need to Print PPS Dashboards and don't want all the HTML and SPS Stuff?

Patrick Husting — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:15:00 GMT

In 50% of our projects, we are asked if there are any options for printing a PerformancePoint Dashboard. The reason for this is when our customers want to print a dashbaord, they want a rich looking report without all the SharePoint clutter. Also, they want to print easily to different paper sizes or orientations. PerformancePoint Server just doesn't have a good option for this through Internet Explorer.

The screenshot below is a prototype we have been working on as an Add-On to PerformancePoint Server 2007. We should have it done within a month or so and available for a small purchase price. Email me if you are interested.

Patrick

Office 14 Online Preview

Patrick Husting — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I have been reading up on the Office 14 features and I think the new browser based Excel opens some interesting business intelligence opportunities. it looks very much like Excel Services in SharePoint but you can actually edit the cells. I'm hoping the rendering of the charts look like they do in Excel and not the web version, they look kind of plain.

You can use some of the quick layout and build features in Excel and quickly post them to allow people externally see those documents inside the web browser. Pretty neat. I look forward to finding out where PerformancePoint Server for Office 14 will be going with its features and functions. I've seen some early work on it several months ago, but we know how that works. Those ideas and features could be scrubbed and new ones added.

Anyway, I thought I would post the Excel 14 web view below because I thought it looked really good.

Extended Analytics 2008 for use with QuickBooks

Patrick Husting — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:03:00 GMT

It has been a REALLY busy year at Extended Results our consulting company. We have had some tremendous growth in regards to customers and employees along with generating some new and interesting intellectual property. I have been using QuickBooks for years for my different companies and I found it to be a great program for managing my ERP needs on a small/mid scale. But this year with all the growth, we had a need for some business intelligence functionality to run the business better. Since there is nothing on the market for QuickBooks for BI, we decided to write it ourselves and start marketing it. It is called Extended Analytics 2008 and you can find out more at http://www.ExtendedAnalytics.com.

We just got it all approved through the QuickBooks licensing/developer program and have begun marketing it to QuickBooks ProAdvisors. We have been surpised with the response and purchases since the release. Very exciting. The solution is totally drag and drop and meant to be brain dead easy to use...

The following screenshot is an example of a Scorecard you can drag and drop right onto your dashboard along with some rich Dundas charts showing your revenue vs. expenses.

You can have multiple analytic charts that can be dragged and dropped into different zones.

Lots of screenshots and feature lists can be found at the product web site which can be visited at http://www.ExtendedAnalytics.com

End-User Adhoc Report Building for PerformancePoint and SharePoint

Patrick Husting — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:00:00 GMT

One request we get all the time is "give us the ability to drag and drop and create our own reports". PerformancePoint really doesn't have any end-user report writing features to do that. Sure you can drill across and down, but you really can't drop in our own measures and dimensions on a blank report and save it out for later use. Sure, you could do it wih the OWC control, but that is being retired out and I wouldn't recommend using it anyway

So, we have engineered a web based solution, very lite, to give us the end-user reporting writing functionality our customers are demanding. So we provide this as an add-on to our PerformancePoint projects and have received some great responses from it. It is a very light weight web application that can connect to your existing OLAP cubes and allows you within an AJAX interface to do your own drag and drop funcitonality.

Below is an example of a GRID with areas to drag and drop measures, rows and filters.

The following example is one of our reports but displayed in a PIE chart. One of the neat features in our application is you can switch between all kinds of charting options like bar (vertical and horizontial), pie, area, line, spline and many others.

Some of the other features are

Connect to multiple OLAP data sources
Turn on and off drop zones
Create/Modify/Rename/Delete Reports
Save XML copy of report to your desktop
Color schemes
Printing
Email Chart
and more

I'm going to save myself a few emails, no, I'm not going to give this away free. Normal time to implement is 1 to 2 weeks and we offer it as a service more than a product.

Hope you enjoyed the writeup

Patrick

Using SharePoint Webparts in PPS

Patrick Husting — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:35:00 GMT

Had a question come up about how to use a SharePoint document library within PPS. Use the following steps to create it.

Open SharePoint Designer and open your SPS site
Create an ASP.NET page
Drag and drop your document library onto the page
Attach the SPS stylesheet so it looks pretty
Save it to the document library on the site
In PPS Designer, create a Web Page Report view and link to that page URL in the SPS document library
Drag and drop onto your dashboard and publish

Let me know if you have any questions

Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference: DATAllegro

Patrick Husting — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Saw a demo of DATAllegro in the Keynote. I was VERY impressed with that they demostrated and really look forward to the internal releases of the software so we can use it on some Microsoft projects. It will not be available until 1st Quarter of 2010! Long time to wait...

I was very impressed with the ability to balance out a 150 terabyte database on 24 low end servers and managed at the software level. Super cool!

More information can be found here: http://www.datallegro.com/ and http://www.datallegro.com/v3/index.asp

Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference: Kilimanjaro

Patrick Husting — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

The Microsoft SQL VP demostrated some exciting new features of the next version of SQL Server that will be coming in 2010!

Self Server BI tool coming in 2010 available as a plug-in for Excel

Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference: BI Demo

Patrick Husting — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

My good friend Bruno did the demostration of a nice looking business intelligence application. Some PPS, Live Maps, Dundas and Excel Services. I like the branding of the portal and the live maps. Pretty nice.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2008 Kickoff

Patrick Husting — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:21:00 GMT

Well, with the financial markets melting down around the world, Microsoft kicked off its business intelligence conference. These are not the best pictures, but I could use my camera phone to capture some pictures. The below picture is from the keynote kickoff of the event.

Coming out for party for Microsoft new purchase: DATAllegro

Patrick Husting — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:07:00 GMT

http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2008/10/03/next_week_microsoft_business_intelligence_conferen.html

The Seattle Times has an article about DATAllegro coming out at the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference. I look forward to checking out the keynote and finding out more about the solution offering. I'll try and post some pictures and articles of interesting things I find there.

Microsoft BI Conference, October 6

Patrick Husting — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:05:00 GMT

Just a couple days away from the Business Intelligence conference. I'm hoping they preview or show some direction for the Office 14 product which includes PerformancePoint. I'll try and post some "Things you should know" when I'm at the conference.

http://www.msbiconference.com/Pages/default.aspx

Creating a Second Y-Axis on an Analytic Chart

Patrick Husting — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:39:00 GMT

We had a need on how to add a second axis on an Analytic Chart and I found the following link. Very helpful...

http://blogs.msdn.com/performancepoint/archive/2008/02/12/creating-a-second-y-axis-on-an-analytic-chart.aspx

Maxing out the Treeview or Multi-Select Control for Filters

Patrick Husting — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:32:00 GMT

When using PPS M&A Treeview Filters on a scorecard, it has a default maximum values of about 200 members and then it doesn't show anymore. You can increase the number of members by adding the following tag in the SharePoint web.config file.

Where "5000" is the maximum number of members to show. Just remember this will have an impact on rendering performance.

Patrick

Creating a Free Form Text Search filters for Performance Point

mjwilson — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:02:00 GMT

While Performance Point offers a wide array of "Out of the box" filter solutions, one of the holes that we found was the inability to perform a user input search. While working on a project, we encountered a situation where the members we wanted to list blew way past the upper limit of the PPS filters. While one solution would be to increase the upper limit, this leads to performance hits on the pages as the reports wait until all of the selected members are loaded.

Our solution: A free form text box that would perform a search against dimensions / members in our cube, and in turn apply the searched item as a filter to the dashboard report.

I used a blog post by Joe Hayes of the PerfomancePoint Product team as an initial stepping stone (as well as the inspiration), as well as the PPS SDK found here.

The solution requires a two part development effort, on one hand you need to create a PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer plug-in in order to create the filter and add it to your dashboards. The second part requires that you build a custom web server control.

The screenshot above has 3 projects included in one solution, the third being an installer to be used to help automate the rollout of the filter to multiple machines, but that is a topic for a different post.

The creation of the PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer plugin is detailed by Joe Hayes, and in the SDK, but more than that, Joe gives you a solid code base to begin building your own filters from. When everything works right and your plug-in loads, you will have a new filter template available to you in Dashboard Designer.

One of my biggest sticking points was understanding what exactly the GetDisplayData and the GetMessageData methods in the DataProvider did, and how they facilitated the communication between not only Dashboard Designer and SharePoint, but the fitler and the report item itself.

GetDisplayData builds the datatable structure that the filter/server will use and expect, as well as define which columns are in the table are to be displayed in the "Source Value" selection box when you link the filter to the dashboard item. GetMessageData is the actual messenger of the system, it builds the datatable (by calling GetDisplayData) and fills it with the members that are to be passed to the report item. What this means is that all your "search" logic is to be built into or called from this method.

Joe and the SDK give you a good base for the Dashboard Designer part, the web server control is a little more of a challenge. While digging through the SDK I never found a section for "Building your own selection controls", but when I was reading through the Web.Config, I noticed that the inherent PPS selection controls were registered under "CustomReportViews", which Joe verified what how they were implemented. This means that the DLL for the web server control is to be registered under "CustomReportViews" in the Web.Config of the parent SharePoint site.

The web server control is really nothing more than a class that overrides the Render method of a page. This method is passed an HTMLTextWriter from which the raw HTML of our search box is loaded and written to the page. I used as StringBuilder to do this, as it allowed for a logical way to stick together a long string of HTML code, as well as the JavaScript that puts together our search value and triggers the post to the report item. This being said, the only real interaction with the report item comes in the onClick event of my button where it calls:

"PPSMA.DashboardController.get_instance().updateParameter('{0}','{1}',[txtVal]);", base.DashboardItemId, base.BeginPoints[0].ParameterUniqueName);"

where "[txtVal]" is the value from my textbox. It is worth noting that the value passed to the dashboard has to be a JavaScript array, even if it is only one value.

Through the web server control you can load any raw HTML controls, but you are not able to utilize ASP.Net controls because of where in the page lifecycle the control is being inserted.

Development notes and suggestions.

The very first suggestion that I might give is to develop on the server. This sounds a little weird, but I have 2 reasons for this:

Both projects require references to some PerformancePoint DLLs that are loaded on install
Debugging is much easier locally rather than messing with Remote Debugging. It's so much easier just to attach to a local process.

There are a couple of tools out there that will ease development as well, the first being CriTrace which is detailed here. One thing to note, by changing the value from "friendlyfile" as it suggests in the blog post to "spy", SharePoint will print out the results actually on the page versus on a file that you have to dig to find.

Also this blog details how to create an ASPX page that does nothing more than print out the parameters that are passed to the report item. This may sound simple, but it was the best tool I could find for figuring out exactly why my filters were broken, and what the inherent PPS controls were passing that I was not.

And finally download Reflector and read the PerformancePoint DLLs. They can and should be your template / insight into how to build your own filters.

Hope this points you in the right direction, and please feel free to get a hold of us if you have any questions!

ProClarity (PAS) and SQL Server 2008

Patrick Husting — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:26:00 GMT

If you want to get ProClarity working with SQL Server 2008, you need the following hotfixes

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=22&p=6&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=&u=%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fFamilyID%3ddc9cbe69-1db1-4f5d-9b48-06b156c0f2c6%26DisplayLang%3den

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=22&p=9&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=&u=%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fFamilyID%3dced0bd47-7d19-40de-8e80-f924784bd7af%26DisplayLang%3den

Resolving Repeating Property Columns on Scorecards with Multiple Time Members Present

Kristi McGraw — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:35:00 GMT

Example of Issue: Exec Owner, and Update Frequency both custom KPI Properties repeat illustrating an instance for both time members FY08 and FY09. The desired effect is to show the YTD Target and Actual repeat for FY08 and FY09 but render the Properties just once.

Steve Handy, a member of the PPS Product Team shared the following steps to achieve application of multiple time slices without repeating Property Columns:

1. The unfortunate caveat: You can do this only right most columns. It’s not possible to do this for left most columns if you want the members to come from a dashboard filter. The work around makes use of the fact the filters only replace members for the first hierarchy on the scorecard.

2. OK, so the real first step: Add a target and Property (i.e. person responsible) to scorecard columns. KPI’s are on rows.

3. Next, drag the “All” member of any dimension (other than time) and place above the Target column while pressing the [Shift] key. The result should look like this:

Add additional metrics you want to repeat under “All” member:

4. In the dashboard, connect the Time Filter to the scorecard columns axis.

5. Publish changes

6. Deploy the scorecard

7. The result is as shown:

This only works, as indicated earlier, if the column you don’t want to repeat is added at the Right end of the scorecard and it is not a child of the “All” member.

Configuring Kerberos for SharePoint 2007

Patrick Husting — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:27:00 GMT

If you want your credentials to pass throughout all your servers for PPS to work correctly, you really need to enable Kerbero's. I found a couple great articles that explain this and the process to do it. Enjoy...

Another one

http://blogs.msdn.com/james_world/archive/2007/08/20/essential-guide-to-kerberos-in-sharepoint.aspx

Another one in regards to Active Directory

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/security/tkerbdel.mspx

PerformancePoint Monitoring Readme for SP 1

Patrick Husting — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:24:00 GMT

From the PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP1 Monitoring readme which you can download here

http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102778591033

PerformancePoint Monitoring Readme

Effective Date: June 6, 2008

Introduction

This file contains important information that was not available when the documentation for the product was written. Workarounds, when they are available, are provided for known issues.

The content in this Readme file applies to the PerformancePoint Monitoring components of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 (SP1). These include:

· PerformancePoint Monitoring Server

· PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer

· PerformancePoint Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services.

PerformancePoint Planning Readme for SP 1

Patrick Husting — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:21:00 GMT

From the PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning Readme file. You can download it here.

http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102778581033

PerformancePoint Planning Readme

Effective date: June 4, 2008.

Introduction

This file contains important information that was not available when the documentation for the product was written. Workarounds, when they are available, are provided for known issues.

The content in this Readme file applies to the following Planning components of PerformancePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 (SP1):

· PerformancePoint Planning Administration Console

· PerformancePoint Planning Server

· PerformancePoint Planning Business Modeler

· PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel

· PerformancePoint Data Import Wizard for Microsoft Dynamics AX

· The Alpine Ski House Sample Application and the PerformancePoint Server Minimal Verification Sample Application

Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP1 Shipped!

Patrick Husting — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

From Microsoft

We are very happy to announce that Service Pack 1 of Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 has been signed off to ship! Representing Microsoft in the growing performance management market, PerformancePoint Server allows customers to align employees to their organization’s strategy by:

· Planning for the future of the business

· Monitoring the performance of your organization

· Analyzing the results

Thanks to everyone who worked on this release (there were many involved) and those in other organizations that assisted in that work. This is our first service pack of our first release so it signals a milestone in our internal rhythm of business.

With this new Service Pack, many enhancements have been made to help customers enhance their decision making with the monitoring, analyzing and planning functionality found in PerformancePoint Server. Usability, stability and performance enhancements are key focus areas for PerformancePoint Server SP1. Customers will have new workbook options to help improve the performance of queries and show the effects of changes in planning assignments for better “what-if” analysis.

Customers using strategy maps and KPI’s for monitoring and analytics will see improvements to scorecard and filter usability. Scorecards with negative numbers are easier to read and dashboards with filters are now much faster to render and provide the ability to link reports directly to KPI’s. There is also added support for Tabular filters and Time Intelligence Post Formula filters, as well as the ability to link multiple filters to a strategy map.

In addition, SP1 adds support for Windows Server 2008. Support for SQL Server 2008 will be available later this year with PerformancePoint Server SP2.

For more information about what’s available in SP1, please check the online help:

Office Online: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX102380591033.aspx

PerformancePoint Server SP1 availability:

Download Center Pages:

Enterprise Version 32-bit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=28B1F86B-B7F2-4215-8BC9-8F8507FF8831&displaylang=en

Enterprise Version 64-bit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6245C354-9191-4C4D-8C0C-C10D6C778AF8&displaylang=en

Evaluation Version 32-bit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6372C24F-67DD-42DD-B034-748907B23420&displaylang=en

Evaluation Version 64-bit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3ADAC793-DEF0-4BA8-A9AB-228979B8DB40&displaylang=en

ProductsWeb for internal users:

http://productsweb/product.aspx?productnameid=2170&status=3&platformid=-999&category=1

MSDN:
We anticipate SP1 availability for MSDN subscribers in the next couple of weeks.

Volume Licensing:

English bits will be available in Volume Licensing in August, 2008

Documentation:

On Office Online: Links to README and other useful information: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX102380591033.aspx
On TechNet: For the IT pro - Deployment Guide, Operations Guide, Whitepapers: http://technet.microsoft.com/office/performancepoint/default.aspx

More PPS M&A SP1 Features/Fixes

Patrick Husting — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:03:00 GMT

PerformancePoint Monitoring Server SP1 includes the following enhancements:

· Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008

· Add a default display condition report view (see related blog post)

· Multi-select Monitoring server filters passing to multi-select SQL Server Reporting Services report parameters

· Time Intelligence Post Filter formula date corrections

o In some instances filters were passing a one day offset, this is resolved

o Date format of filter will now honor localized formats

· Negative numbers will not cause a text wrap in scorecards

· Dashboard filter performance improvements

· Expand/collapse functions work properly with hidden parent KPI members

· Updated sample data file

· Tabular filter support

· Multi-select filters can now be passed to a Strategy Map report view

· Limit of 1,000 characters in an MDX expression for KPIs has been removed

· No longer blocked from using SQL Server 2008 as a data source (NOTE: full support for 2008 is coming in SP2, we just won’t prevent you from running on it with SP1)

Useful SharePoint Site

Patrick Husting — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:19:00 GMT

Since PPS M&A requirements SharePoint, I bet you find yourself doing a lot of SharePoint setup and development. I found the following link today that I have found kind of useful.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Pedia/pages/home.aspx

Installing PPS on a Domain Controller

Patrick Husting — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:09:00 GMT

I got this from an internal document on how to install PPS on the same machine that has Active Directory installed.

Domain Controllers

While it's not a hard-and-fast rule, most AD administrators will tell you that a domain controller should not run other applications. Since your domain controllers are the "keys" to your network "kingdom", you should do your best to isolate them from attack. By adding additional applications to run on a DC, you are increasing the number of ways that a malicious user can attack that DC. Depending on the size of your network, having dedicated domain controllers may also improve performance in terms of user authentication, and logon times.

Running PerformancePoint Server 2007 on a domain controller is not an advised production scenario and is not a supported scenario. This is why the installer blocks the install of PerformancePoint Server 2007 on domain controllers.

Workaround

There is a command line parameter that will allow the PerformancePoint Server 2007 to install and configure on a domain controller. There are some manual steps to be complete before installation and configuration.

Installing PerformancePoint Planning Server on a Domain Controller

1. You MUST create a new domain account for the Planning Service Identity. You cannot use the domain administrator account as the Service Identity.

2. Using Start\Administrators\Active Directory Users and Computers:

a. Create a new domain account, e.g. DOMAIN\PlanningSI

b. Add it to the Domain Administrators group

c. Add it to the IIS_WPG group

3. Open Start\Administrative Tools\Domain Controller Security Policy

a. Under Local Policies\User Rights Assignment:

i. Grant PlanningSI the “Log on as a batch job” right

ii. Grant PlanningSI the “Log on as a service” right

4. Install the Planning server MSI using this command line:

a. msiexec /i PPLSrv.msi SKIPOSCHECK=true

5. In the Configuration Wizard, specify the domain account created above as the SI account

Installing PerformancePoint Monitoring Server on a Domain Controller

1. If you are using a domain account, you must add it to the Administrators and IIS_WPG groups before installing the Monitoring Server. You don’t need to do this if using Network Service (recommended).

2. To add a domain account to the appropriate groups: Use Start\Administrators\Active Directory Users and Computers:

a. Add it to the Domain Administrators group

b. Add it to the IIS_WPG group

3. Install the Monitoring server MSI using this command line:

a. msiexec /i PscSrv.msi SKIPOSCHECK=true

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 1

Patrick Husting — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:38:00 GMT

What is in it, got this email the following week. It doesn't list everything, but if they are doing everything that is in the email, that is a good thing.

· Filter performance – you should see a 4-6x improvement in your filter performance, this is an area we would like some feedback on

· Multi-select filters in PPS will now pass to multi-select parameters in SSRS reports

· Negative numbers causing text wrap

· Time Intelligence day offset issues and localization issues

· Display conditions not working for strategy map and excel services views

· Null actual values yielding incorrect status

· Dashboard designer dashboard layout improvements

· Chart/grid bug fixes

· Strategy map improvements

· And many more

There are almost 300 fixes that are implemented in SP1.