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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
<add key="Bpm.TreeViewControlMaxNumRecordsToRender" value="5000" />
Where "5000" is the maximum number of members to show. Just remember this will have an impact on rendering performance.
Patrick
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!