Microsoft Business Intelligence Blog

PerformancePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 2 (SP2)

2008-12-05T20:25:00Z

PerformancePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) includes enhancements such as improved query performance, support for SQL Server 2008, increased compatibility with Windows Server 2008, including support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and more filtering capabilities for PerformancePoint dashboards. These enhancements boost the already robust capabilities of PerformancePoint Server 2007. For more information on Service Pack 2, see Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 on TechNet.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX102380591033.aspx?ofcresset=1

Microsoft Surface Business Intelligence

2008-11-17T11:00:00Z

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?

2008-11-10T14:15:00Z

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

2008-11-03T14:00:00Z

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

2008-10-24T13:03:00Z

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

2008-10-20T12:00:00Z

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

2008-10-09T21:35:00Z

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

2008-10-08T00:30:00Z

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

2008-10-07T22:00:00Z

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

2008-10-07T18:00:00Z

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

2008-10-07T04:21:00Z

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

2008-10-06T00:07:00Z

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

2008-10-04T13:05:00Z

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

2008-09-30T18:39:00Z

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

2008-09-20T03:32:00Z

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