Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server

PerformancePoint Server Planning – The living Dead

blog@tobo.ch — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:51:54 GMT

You thought PerformancePoint Server is dead? It is not!

Microsoft announced a new Accelerator-component on their partner website; The "Financial Planning Accelerator". This component is derived from the source code and project files of the Planning Module of PerformancePoint server and is available on a non-cost, individual license.

Microsoft Partners can get and modify the source code like it were open source. But in fact it isn't, because PPS Client Access Licenses are needed to distribute the code to the end users.

You can find more information about the Financial Planning Accelerator on Microsoft's Partner Website.

Technorati-Tags: PerformancePoint Server Planning,Financial Planning Accelerator,Microsoft Business Intelligence,BI

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 CTP4 released!

blog@tobo.ch — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 08:42:00 GMT

What a joy this morning as I looked at the connect site of PPS. CTP4 has been released this night (europe ;-))! I'm currently downloading all components and then I will try to bring them up on my virtual machine. More about my experiences with CTP4 later...

What are the key-advantages of CTP4? The following listing is a copy from the official "Whats new"-document downloaded from connect.

Planning Server

Business Modeler

· Business Rule Templates. Several additional rule templates have been added.

· PPSCmd. The command-line tool had some additions to provide ability for scripting of overall system processes. For example, the ability to deploy and reprocess models and data.

· Migration. Additional feature work was done to enable migration of an application between two server environments.

· Jobs. Improved user experience for executing and managing jobs.

· Data Types. Dimension member properties now support more data types.

Excel Client

· Offline Cache. Improved management of locally cached objects.

· Templates. Additional report templates have been added.

· Review and Approval. Reviewers and Approvers can now manage submissions through a single dialog. Support has been added for bulk operations.

· Filters. Form and report filters now support dimension properties.

Server

· Performance. Several changes were made to improve overall server performance. Additionally, Financial Job and calculations have specific performance enhancements.

· System Information. Error message reporting and system logging has been improved from prior releases.

· Associations. Improved capabilities for working with complex associations. Better performance handling large associations and movement of large data set.

· Security. Public interfaces have improved resistance to any potentially malicious attacks.

Monitoring Server

Dashboards

· OLAP View Sorting/Filtering. Users can now sort (by column) and filter empty rows/columns in Analytic Charts and Grids.

· OLAP View Types. Users can now switch between grids and charts and also change chart types (includes bar charts, stacked bar charts, stacked 100% bar charts, line charts and combined bar/line charts).

· OLAP Member Properties in Grid. Users can now add attributes of a member into the OLAP grid.

· Cell Level Actions. Users can now see the cell level actions behind a value in an OLAP grid or chart.

· Export to PowerPoint. SharePoint users can now export dashboard views to Microsoft Office PowerPoint.

· Multiple Filters. Users can now pass multiple dashboard filters to scorecards and report views.

· Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services Users can now add PerformancePoint Monitoring dashboard items to an existing SharePoint page through a new PerformancePoint Web Part.

Dashboard Designer

· Dashboard Designer Ribbon Changes. Usability improvements within the Dashboard Designer Ribbon, which is part of the Microsoft® Office Fluent™ User Interface.

· OLAP View Configuration. Enables light configuration options on charts and grid (fonts, formats, chart legend placement, grid layout).

· PAS Integration. Users can now add PAS report views into their dashboards.

· Time Intelligence KPI Filters. Users can now add Time Intelligence expressions to individual KPIs.

· Scorecard Filters. Users can now pass members from scorecards into report views. (Example: Passing the KPI Name to an SSRS report.)

Excel Services Support

· Excel Services as a Data Source. Users can now import tables or named ranges from Excel Services spreadsheets.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft PerformancePoint Server, Business Intelligence, CTP4

Installing ProClarity Analytics Server on the same machine as PerformancePoint Server CTP3 with SharePoint

blog@tobo.ch — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:09:18 GMT

If you install ProClarity Analytics Server on the same machine as your are running a PerformancePoint Server CTP3 environment with Office SharePoint Server 2007 (for Monitoring) you will run into problems after the installation. While opening the Analytics Server Administration Tool a login-dialog appears. Whatever you type-in, a successful login isn't possible.

The problem has a simple reason. SharePoint Server creates a new Web Application for localhost Port 80, and stops the Default Web in Internet Information Services. But the setup of ProClarity Analytics Server installs its Virtual Directories into the stopped Default Web. So the Administration Tool cannot connect to the required services on http:///PAS.

To solve this problem, you just have to create the virtual directories manually in the Sharepoint - 80 Web Application. Use an own Application Pool derrived from the DefaultAppPool for these Web Applications, because the one of Sharepoint uses very complex configurations from web.config, what leads into several problems. Just use a new one.

Technorati Tags: ProClarity Analytics Server, Business Intelligence, Microsoft PerformancePoint Server, Analysis, Problem

Problems installing Planning Server Samples

blog@tobo.ch — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:50:09 GMT

Today I've hardly tried to install the Planning Server Samples of the CTP2 release. I've done all the settings in the DeploymentConfig.xml correctly, but everytime I've started the Install.cmd Script I've got the following error message:

-----------------------------------------
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\2007\Samples\Alpine Ski House>install.cmd

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\2007\Samples\Alpine Ski House>..\Scripts\DeploymentPrepare.vbs
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.

Creating files with tasks to be executed
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\2007\Samples\Scripts\DeploymentPrepare.vbs(112, 17) Microsoft VBScript runtime error: Path not found
--------------------------------------------

After researching this problem I could locate the real cause in a bug of the DeploymentPrepare.vbs Script. The script first copies all DeploymentTasks to the temporary-folder which lies in the Local Settings of the user profile. Because I was logged in as the Administrator of my domain PERFPOINT, this resultet in the following path: C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator.PERFPOINT\Local Settings\Temp. But the script used the user profile of the local administrator in C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp for building the temporary file structure. Despite the processing of this temporary files used the first path.

The solution of this problem was quite easy. I used the sysinternals tool "junction" to create a junction between this paths. That means that the Temp-Folder of Administrator.PERFPOINT points to the Temp-Folder of Administrator.
junction "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator.PERFPOINT\Local Settings\Temp" "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp"

PerformancePoint Server CTP4 announced

blog@tobo.ch — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 10:54:09 GMT

Yesterday I was very glad to see that there are some CTP4 bits of PerformancePoint Server available for Microsoft employees. http://bimvp.com/blogs/bsm/archive/2007/08/10/performancepoint-server-2007-monitoring-and-analytics-got-ctp4-today.aspx
That means that the CTP4 release is not far away. It hope that it happens this week.