XML/A Thin Miner

XML/A Thin Miner is a tool that generates and executes DMX and XML/A for data mining queries.

XML/A Thin Miner

Excel 2007 – CubeValue Reporting and Excel Services

Within PerformancePoint, and for cubes in general, Excel is usually the reporting tool of choice, or the tool being replaced by Monitoring scorecards.  The pivot table in Excel can only get you so far in terms of set-based reporting.  Sometimes free-form reports are required.

These functions provide this ability in Excel.  

This page presents how to work with Microsoft Excel 2007 features and its redesigned interface. You may also visit our Excel Question page.

Cube functions

CUBEKPIMEMBER function

CUBEMEMBER function

CUBEMEMBERPROPERTY function

CUBERANKEDMEMBER function

CUBESET function

CUBESETCOUNT function

CUBEVALUE function

Plan Excel reports against OLAP cubes

Updated: 2009-02-26

In this article:

• About building Excel reports against OLAP cubes

• OLAP functions

• OLAP formulas

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263194(office.12).aspx

Once the reports are built, they need to be consumed.  Other than email distribution or publishing to a document library, Excel Services would be the preferred display method for companies using Sharepoint 2007 Portal Server Enterprise. (MOSS)

There are some whitepapers for Configuring Excel Services to support this functionality.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263430(office.12).aspx

White paper: Excel Services step-by-step guides

Updated: 2007-03-08

These guides help you learn about Excel Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 functionality and understand the relationships among various components of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The procedures in these guides take you step by step through the process of configuring and using Excel Services to build fully functional PivotTable reports, charts, and a variety of other reports. You can also learn how to restrict access to spreadsheet data and connect to an external data source.

Download the following guides as Microsoft Word documents (.doc).

• Setting up the Server - Step 1: Creating a Trusted Location with Excel Services (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84833&clcid=0x409)

• Setting up the Server - Step 2: Configuring Single Sign-On for Excel Services (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84834&clcid=0x409)

• Setting up the Server - Step 3: Creating a Trusted Data Connection Library with Excel Services (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84836&clcid=0x409)

• Building a Report Based on Cube Functions for Excel Web Access (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84828&clcid=0x409)

• Protecting Workbook Intellectual Property (IP) with View Item Rights (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84832&clcid=0x409)

• Using OLAP Formulas, Conditional Formatting, and Charts (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84838&clcid=0x409)

• Building an OLAP PivotTable Report with Excel Services (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84830&clcid=0x409)

• Building a Relational PivotTable Report with Excel Services (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84827&clcid=0x409)

• Building a Report with a Chart for Excel Web Access Based on Cube Functions (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84829&clcid=0x409)

• Creating a Multi-Report Summary Page of Reseller Sales Data (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84831&clcid=0x409)

Excel 2007 - Cube

These Excel Services reports can be consumed as PerformancePoint Monitoring data sources.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/performancepoint/archive/2007/07/12/how-to-use-excel-services-as-a-data-source.aspx

They can be referenced directly within PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/performancepoint/HA102524991033.aspx

SSIS Package Manager - PacMan

A series of tools for ETL projects, including one that performs mass updates called PacMan.

http://ssisctc.codeplex.com/

http://bixpress.codeplex.com/

http://sqlservermddestudio.codeplex.com/

http://pacman.codeplex.com/

http://powershellscripttask.codeplex.com/

http://ssisunit.codeplex.com/

And the best of them all, for ETL and adds the missing components for BIDS.

http://bidshelper.codeplex.com/

Todd's World: Why Isn’t Predictive Analytics a Big Thing?

Answer?  Because it only works until it doesn’t.

Why Isn’t Predictive Analytics a Big Thing?

I’m baffled as to why Predictive Analytics still has the status of a fringe, niche, and advanced realm of the Microsoft Business Intelligence world. Business Intelligence without Predictive Analytics is like a bus taking you most of the way home from work, but dropping you off on the main drag leaving you with a two mile walk. Those two miles are doable and it is great exercise, but what if you’re short on time, ill or injured, it’s pouring rain, or it’s full of dangerous drivers? The bus may have taken you 90% of the way home in terms of miles, but that last 10% of miles is really half the journey in terms of time and effort.

Todd's World: Why Isn’t Predictive Analytics a Big Thing?

InformIT: Safari Books Online: Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Services 2010 Unleashed

Have not posted here in awhile.  Here is an upcoming book on PerformancePoint Services 2010 along with a “rough cuts” version that’s available now, for those early adopters.

The full version.

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-SharePoint-PerformancePoint-Services-Unleashed/dp/0672330946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272306230&sr=1-1

There is a rough cuts version of the 2010 book that is available, partially online.

http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0789740753

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780789740755?portal=informit

InformIT: Safari Books Online: Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Services 2010 Unleashed

Download details: 2010 IW Demo VM (Beta)

Considering an upgrade?  If you’re planning on using PerformancePoint 2010 or Sharepoint 2010 in a local development environment, you may want to consider beefing up your system and getting into the Solid State Drive world.

• 2 or more internal SSD drives.
• 8+ GB of RAM

Sounds like an HP Envy to me…

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008 R2; Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise; Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard

In order to run this demo you will need the following: - Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role enabled. - Drive Formatting: NTFS - Processor: Intel VT or AMD-V capable - RAM: 8 GB or more recommended - Hard disk space required for install: 50 GB

Download details: 2010 IW Demo VM (Beta)

PerformancePoint Services : Upgrading PerformancePoint Server 2007 to PerformancePoint 2010 - Straightforward and easy?

 
Doesn't seem that straightforward to me.  Most customers I know that would run Sharepoint would have a hard time giving their BI groups access to their corporate Sharepoint portals.

The "Import PerformancePoint Server 2007 Content" option seems the most straightforward requiring the least amount of database access, however the limitation of requiring Sharepoint admin rights to create security groups might be an issue for some clients.

At least there are quite a few different options to migrate content.

Most of the customers who have been using PerformancePoint Server 2007 have accumulated several months, if not years, worth of dashboards and data. Their KPIs, grids, charts, scorecards, and custom objects have gone to good use, providing a great deal of corporate discussion about how to handle business decisions and to help plan for the future. And while the 2007 version of PerformancePoint helped to do this very well, the SharePoint BI 2010 version does it even better. Understandably, most companies want to build on top of their old dashboards in 2010. And the idea of starting from scratch is unthinkable. Fortunately, Microsoft has a nice migration path so that you can migrate all of your existing objects to the new version. The migration process is straightforward, but to help ensure that things go smoothly, we’ve created a set of steps to follow.

PerformancePoint Services : Upgrading PerformancePoint Server 2007 to PerformancePoint 2010

Microsoft Excel – Asymmetrical Reports

No more counting rows of data in PerformancePoint and matching them up with the previously selected data to create asymmetrical reports.  Excel 2010 has this functionality built-in… provided you have a cube or data source behind the scenes created.

I wonder how dynamic it really is though… seems like next year (or next month) I’m going to be changing the columns in my report manually.  There had better be some dynamic time intelligence in there – without resorting to custom MDX.

Creating an Asymmetric Report with the New Set UI

A very common report layout needed by our customers is to show actual sales for the year 2008 while showing forecasted sales for the year 2009. Here is a PivotTable showing actual, budgeted and forecasted sales quotas for the last two fiscal years (click to see larger image).

As you can observe there is a lot of irrelevant information in our report such as Forecast for 2008 (since we have actual data for 2008) and Actual for 2009 (since this only includes 9 months of data). If I tried to hide Actual it would actually get hidden for both 2008 and 2009, but since I have Excel 2010 I can go ahead and create a set out my information on columns by simply going to PivotTable Tools -> Options in the ribbon, and selecting “Create set based on column items”.

Now the Named Set creation UI will pop up (click to see larger image):

The UI contains all the tuples that currently define the column labels of my Pivot report. Now I can easily remove the tuples I no longer want. In this case I am going to go ahead and remove:

Microsoft Excel

Fast GPUs Accelerate Performance of In-Memory OLAP Server | SYS-CON AUSTRALIA

 
Looks like NVidia’s Tesla cards are getting some traction.

The development is based on the open-source Jedox's Palo OLAP Server. By utilizing fast GPUs originally designed for computer games, the team of researchers and developers was able to make the breakthrough and accelerate the performance of OLAP analyses with Palo by up to 40 times of its current performance.

A prototype of this GPU version of Palo will be introduced by Jedox at this year's CeBIT at their stand in hall 4, D 53. Additionally, Jedox will also present the new release of its multiprocessor version of Palo 3.0.

Fast GPUs Accelerate Performance of In-Memory OLAP Server | SYS-CON AUSTRALIA

PerformancePoint Server Planning Gets a New Lease on Life -- Enterprise Systems

Not so much a new lease on life, as a transplant of an appendage that may or may not get rejected, the source code for PerformancePoint is released.

PerformancePoint Server Planning Gets a New Lease on Life

Microsoft last week announced a reprieve, of sorts, for beleaguered users of its PerformancePoint Planning Server.

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 06/24/2009

PerformancePoint Server Planning Gets a New Lease on Life -- Enterprise Systems

Microsoft BI: Partners

Microsoft releases the source code for PerformancePoint Planning to partners and customers.

Financial Planning Accelerator

Microsoft is pleased to make available the Financial Planning Accelerator (FPA). The FPA is source code and project files derived from the PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning module. Based on requests from customers and partners, we are making this code available on a no-cost, individual license.
This is unsupported source code that customers and partners can use to support or change PerformancePoint Server Planning functionality. Derived object code files can be distributed to end users with Microsoft SharePoint Server Enterprise Client Access Licenses. To obtain access to the FPA a license agreement between Microsoft and the customer or partner is required. After that agreement is in place, download instructions will be made available.
Please e-mail fpasupp@microsoft.com to request the agreement.

Microsoft BI: Partners

Simple Studies - Best Free Online Accounting Lessons

We provide free online accounting lessons that teach introduction to accounting. These accounting tutorials explain financial accounting principles in simple accounting terms. The website also has accounting exercises with solutions and accounting dictionary. 

Simple Studies - Best Free Online Accounting Lessons

Reed Me : Bing: there it is! My PPS setup problem(s) solved.

 
Some tricks to setting up PPS with SQL 2008.

Obligatory bing plug. The name is growing on me... Link #1 in the search results was Nick Barclay’s great post on sorting out PPS setup issues with SQL Server 2008:

"System.Web.Extensions" performancepoint "configuration error" - Bing

Useful reference linkages:

• Installing and Troubleshooting M&A on Win / SQL 2008
• Install PerformancePoint Monitoring Server with SQL Server 2008 (TechNet)
• ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (the missing piece what was causing the problem)

Reed Me : Bing: there it is! My PPS setup problem(s) solved.

Example Gallery – Tableau

Tableau has some interesting data visualizations and can connect to both relational and OLAP data sources, including PerformancePoint Planning.  Plus it’s really easy to use if you are familiar with pivot tables and drag-drop functionality. 

Check out the blog for more details and other interesting examples

http://www.tableausoftware.com/community/blog 

Example Gallery

Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management Suites

MS has been dropped from Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CPM.

Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance
Management Suites

Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management Suites

Microsoft Excel : Common Questions Around Excel 2007 OLAP PivotTables

 

Common Questions Around Excel 2007 OLAP PivotTables

Today's author: Allan Folting, a program manager who works on the Excel team.

I have gotten lots of questions from customers around specific functionality in Microsoft Excel 2007 PivotTables that is missing when connected to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Service Pack 2 cubes:

1. Filtering individual calculated members
2. Showing non-visual totals when filtering

I have also gotten lots of requests for the ability to add calculations to OLAP PivotTables using the object model, specifically:

1. Adding calculated members/measures
2. Adding named sets

Today I'll discuss these topics and outline current ways and workarounds to address this.

Microsoft Excel : Common Questions Around Excel 2007 OLAP PivotTables

Ten Tips for Using SharePoint Server 2007 with Excel Services

 

Ten Tips for Using SharePoint Server 2007 with Excel Services

Summary: Learn ten tips to improve your use of SharePoint Server 2007 with Excel Services from the SharePoint - Excel Services forum. (15 printed pages)

Joel Krist, Akona Consulting

May 2008

Ten Tips for Using SharePoint Server 2007 with Excel Services

Nick Barclay: BI-Lingual: PerformancePoint Monitoring Data Source Connection Problems

 

A PPS Monitoring server's default, out-of-the-box, behaviour is to connect to all data sources using a PPS application pool identity account.

That last sentence is important so it's worth repeating...

A PPS Monitoring server's default, out-of-the-box, behaviour is to connect to all data sources using a PPS application pool identity account.

Nick Barclay: BI-Lingual: PerformancePoint Monitoring Data Source Connection Problems

Download details: Microsoft Windows Dynamic Cache Service

Investigating bottlenecks with 64-bit servers?  Check the memory and ensure it is available.

Overview

The Microsoft Windows Dynamic Cache Service will manage the working set size of the Windows System File Cache. For 64 bit systems this service helps to address the problem of excessive cached read I/O that could eventually consume all of physical memory. Sample source code and compiled files are included in the compressed file.

Download details: Microsoft Windows Dynamic Cache Service

Request for comment: Global filters linked to different models

Modifying the RDL of a PPS Matrix to activate functionality within the product… tedious but useful.

We've found a way of implementing global filters (we use dimension property filters) for different models... and we'd like to know pitfalls of our approach (for the moment I can guess 2 :-))

Task: Apply global "Entity - Office" filter to Operations and Salary models

Approach:

1. Create all matrices and filters needed and apply corresponding filters to matrices.

Matrix 1: Model - Operations. Columns - Entity:Business unit Leaves. Rows - Account. Dimension property filter: Entity - Office. 

Matrix 2: Model - Salary. Columns - Account. Rows - Entity:Employees. Dimension property filter: Entity - Office

2. Edit RDL

2a. Find filter definitions

<ReportParameter Name="PerformancePoint_ebb03fb2_b6f8_4298_91cf_ceb94ee473ff"> ' Filter from Operations Model to be applied to Salary model

…

</ReportParameter>

<ReportParameter Name="PerformancePoint_ef581824_8178_4b6b_a743_59a26f740964"> ' Filter from Salary Model to be "skipped"

…

</ReportParameter>

2b. Replace Name and Value for QueryParameters using appropriate name of one of the filters (ReportParameter) you want to use for different models:

<QueryParameters>

<QueryParameter Name="PerformancePoint_ef581824_8178_4b6b_a743_59a26f740964"> ' to be replaced with see bellow

<QueryParameter Name="PerformancePoint_ebb03fb2_b6f8_4298_91cf_ceb94ee473ff">

<Value>=Parameters!PerformancePoint_ef581824_8178_4b6b_a743_59a26f740964.Value</Value> ' to be replaced with see bellow

<Value>=Parameters!PerformancePoint_ebb03fb2_b6f8_4298_91cf_ceb94ee473ff.Value</Value>

</QueryParameter>

</QueryParameters>

3. That's it.

If I select Office for Operations matrix, it's also applied to Salary Matrix :-)

Guessed pitfalls:

1. Forms and reports created using this approach can't be migrated to other application - this is hardcode! :-(

2. Any change to report definition will destroy our filters override - this is hardcode! :-(

Any thoughts re other difficulties we'll meet?

Regards, Vasily

Request for comment: Global filters linked to different models

Log Parser Lizard GUI (free edition) - Lizard Labs

Using Lizard to parse PPS Planning logs.

1. Create a header file.

DateTime Event PPS Location User Details

Note that spaces delimit the file.

2.  Create a new Log Parser Lizard Group & Query for PPS.

3. Select Tab-separated and space-separated values

4. Enter Query

select top 100 *
from '\\Path_To_PPS_Server_Logs\trace log\server.log'
--where details like '%error%'
order by rownumber desc

5. In Query Properties:

iHeaderFile = <step 2 filename>
nFields = 6
iSeparator = ‘space’
FixedSep = true

Save and “Generate” (run) the query.

 

Log Parser Lizard GUI (free edition) - Lizard Labs

Log Parser Lizard GUI (free edition) - Lizard Labs

 

Click here to download Log Parser Lizard

Log Parser is a very powerful, free and versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data, such as log files, XML files, and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Microsoft Windows operating system, such as the event log, IIS log, the registry, the file system, and the Active Directory services.

Because the command-line interface is not very intuitive, I have created Log Parser Lizard, a GUI tool for managing queries, exporting results to Excel, charts, etc… In addition I have added input filters for RegEx and log4net input log formats (with support for regular expressions) and SQL server T-SQL queries. There are some helpful examples included in installation package to help you start using Log Parser Lizard (and it’s SQL like syntax) for a web log analyzer and system log analyzer.  

Log Parser Lizard GUI (free edition) - Lizard Labs

Jon Gallant's Blog : Most Popular Microsoft Blogs – January 09

Microsoft PerformancePoint Team Blog was #81.  I wonder how it’s looking this month…

The Microsoft blogs solution has a lot of great features, but an important feature that is missing is popularity metrics. I want to know what the community is most interested in and keep up on all things Microsoft. The “all posts” feed that comes OOB doesn’t do the trick. My team inherited the Microsoft blogs apps (http://blogs.msdn.com/, http://blogs.technet.com/) recently and we are in the process of looking at adding new features to support many views over the data. Until we have all the details fleshed out I will continue post the 100 most popular MSDN and TechNet blogs on a monthly basis…complete with Opml so you can subscribe to them all at once.

Jon Gallant's Blog : Most Popular Microsoft Blogs – January 09

SQL Server 2008 Training Resources - Canada

Large collection of training resources.

SQL Server 2008 Training Resources - Canada

The Baker's Dozen: 13 Tips for Querying OLAP Databases with MDX

Roll your own Assumption Model with LookupCube.

with member [PurchaseAmt] AS LOOKUPCUBE("Project Materials Cube", "([Measures].[Purchase Amount],[Fy Qtr].[" + [FY Qtr].CurrentMember.Name + "])" ) -- We need to construct a string that looks -- exactly like this&#133; -- ( [Measures].[Purchase Amount] , [Fy Qtr].[2005 Q1]) select { [Measures].[HoursWorked], [Measures].[Total Labor], [PurchaseAmt]} on columns, [Fy Qtr].children on rows from [Project Labor Cube]

The Baker's Dozen: 13 Tips for Querying OLAP Databases with MDX

Cubegeek: Microsoft PPS: Dead.

This site will soon be called www.performancepointed.com I think.

Per-for-mance-Point-ed - definition:  To develop a planning & forecasting tool for the masses and bring the role of IT back into to Finance, and then communicate that you are discontinuing the tool after planning & forecasting cuts, and realizing many of the masses don't have multiple SQL Server Enterprise Edition and Sharepoint servers just laying around.

Disappointment indeed. It's now official. I can say with finality that I wasted a year in my career.

Cubegeek: Microsoft PPS: Dead.

Demand for PerformancePoint jobs in the UK experienced almost a 25% increase year over year.

If that was a stock I would probably be selling it.  Nice return and unsustainable growth?

Speaking of stock...

The trendline on this doesn't look very good, though I would suspect that we have some bottoms around here.  MS hasn't seen 18 bucks since the Asian crisis of 1998. 

From ITJobsWatch

I guess that intangible benefits like CFO visibility and the "potential" of Windows/Office 2007/SQL Server 2008/Sharepoint license sales and adoption don't matter in an economic downturn. Or perhaps the "what-if" analysis MS built for themselves was too good for their own good?  Maybe they forecasted something they didn't want to see?

I have been working with Planning since CTP2 and am a certified PPS Planning Trainer.  When they demo'ed Performance Point (Business Scorecard Manager) way back in 2005 at a partner convention I went to in Redmond, there was some serious excitement there.  Finally, MS would have the proper client tools for Analysis Services to compete with other OLAP vendors on, instead of some Office Web Components and a pivot table. 

Planning was just a bonus.  Bonuses get cut back in economic downturns... unless you're a bank, or a certain bank CEO. (Isn't MS a bank too?)

The good news is that PPS Monitoring is now free with Sharepoint (or is it Sharepoint is now free with PPS?).  Now if they would only release the source code for Planning & Management Reporter (and why not toss in Proclarity Desktop too?) so we can go back to building custom-tailored planning solutions without the constraints of a packaged planning tool... and have the ability to fix some of the troublesome bugs and performance issues inherent in a V1 product.

At least give us the source code for that Excel add-in reporting tool.  Lots of good possibilities there.

Nothing wrong with a little .NET code to solve some business issues.  So much more fun debugging rules in Visual Studio than trying to debug and maintain rules in a client tool like the PPS-P GUI.  Planning should have been a web application to begin with.  Keep it in the cloud guys...

Well, I'm off to develop the "yellow cell input" feature checkbox on the Excel 2007 ribbon.  The checklist for getting mine to work should be a bit shorter than the current "yellow cell input" checklist for Planning. 

1. Click the 'yellow cell input' checkbox in Excel 2007 (or just format the cell as INPUT).
2. Input your values.
3. Add your commentary next to the values.
4. Publish to your database and refresh the cube.

This was probably how Biz#/Planning got started too... 

I think we're on step #6 of the definition for performance at Microsoft.

per·form·ance [ pər fáwrmənss ] (plural per·form·ances)

noun

Definition:

1. artistic presentation: a presentation of an artistic work such as a play or piece of music to an audience

2. manner of functioning: the manner in which something or somebody functions, operates, or behaves
a high-performance car

3. working effectiveness: the way in which somebody does a job, judged by its effectiveness ( often used before a noun )
performance-related pay

4. thing accomplished: something that is carried out or accomplished

5. accomplishment of something: the act of carrying out or accomplishing something such as a task or action

6. display of behavior: a public display of behavior that others find distasteful, e.g. an angry outburst that causes embarrassment ( informal )

7. linguistics language produced: the language that a speaker or writer actually produces, as distinct from his or her understanding of the language.
See also  competence (sense 3) parolen (sense 5)

http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861724999/performance.html

Sacha has more info.

http://blogs.adatis.co.uk/blogs/sachatomey/archive/2009/01/29/rip-performancepoint-planning.aspx

So does Ajay.

http://ppsinfo.blogspot.com/2009/01/pps-planning-is-being-discontinued-what.html

Convert PivotTable to PerformancePoint Planning Matrix - Sacha Tomey's blog

Sacha finds an interesting "upsizing" feature for Pivot tables.

Now if only it was so easy to convert from Report Wizard to Matrix to Custom MDX to Management Reporter Reporting Services... and back again.

There should be a market for PerformancePoint Planning RDL converters pretty soon...

Convert PivotTable to PerformancePoint Planning Matrix

I spotted a 'Convert to PerformancePoint Matrix' menu option on the context menu
of an Excel PivotTable recently.

I'd not noticed it before - it is documented within the PPS Excel Add-In help but only once, and subtly at that.  I'm glad to report, on first impressions, it appears to do a fairly decent job.

It's a one-way process that cannot be undone and it creates a 'User defined' MDX style matrix.  You are therefore limited to making subsequent edits using the Report Properties window but suffice to say it's a handly little feature that I'll no doubt use more and more now I've found it.

Convert PivotTable to PerformancePoint Planning Matrix - Sacha Tomey's blog

Download details: 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components

 

This download will install a set of components that can be used by non-Microsoft Office applications to read data from and write data to 2007 Office system files such as Microsoft Office Access 2007 (mdb and accdb) files and Microsoft Office Excel 2007 (xls, xlsx, and xlsb) files. Connectivity to text files is also supported.

ODBC and OLEDB drivers are installed for application developers to use in developing their applications with connectivity to Office file formats.

Download details: 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components

Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet (V2)

This post doesn't have a lot to do with PerformancePoint specifically, however there are lots of possibilities to use Regular Expressions to solve some of your business requirements.

With the previously blogged-about plugin for Excel (morefunc) you have the ability to use Regular Expressions as formulas in Excel.  You can also use Regular expressions in Excel with some VBA code.

What are Regular Expressions?  They're anything but regular.  They allow you to design expressions to apply to tasks such as searching for patterns of data, data validation, etc.  Rather than just searching for the @ sign to find a "possible" email address, you could use regular expressions to find an exact interpretation of an email address with this regular expression.

\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b

You could also use this as a data validation rule to ensure that you are cleanly entering email addresses into a form for later import into the application using CSV.

These expressions look very cryptic until you get the gist of the syntax.

These types of tools could be handy for cleansing data before they enter the PerformancePoint staging database or within an input form.  They could also be useful for mapping and profiling data.

For example, labels are required to be no more than 40 characters in length, member properties are restricted to 100 characters, and there are a series of restricted characters and reserved words.  You could design a regular expression that checks for these values within your data before it is loaded into the system.  You could build something to do this in Excel or use SSIS, or even in a stored procedure before moving the data into a label table.

Another application would be to "tokenize" or split a pattern into a comma-delimited string. (eg. Account-Dept-Location), Lexical Analysis in geekspeak terms.

http://effbot.org/zone/xml-scanner.htm

http://en.csharp-online.net/CSharp_Regular_Expression_Recipes%E2%80%94A_Better_Tokenizer

It is easy to tokenize a value with 3 hyphens without learning regular expressions, but what if you needed to parse something like this to get the numbers out?

123ab2c
1234abc

Regular expressions might be useful...

How about a search/replace, but with intelligence?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.text.regularexpressions.regex.replace.aspx

Within SSIS, you can use this to perform data profiling and to classify data into buckets.

SSIS Regex Component
SSIS Regular Expression Transformation

You can use it in SQL

SQL and Regular Expressions
Regular Expressions with PATINDEX in SQL
Regular Expressions with OACREATE in SQL
Working with crummy data in SQL

It's about as handy as knowing XSLT and MDX

Regex is as forgettable as XSLT and MDX

The most useful tools for learning Regular Expressions:

Regulator and Regulazy

Some 3rd-party implementations of Regex:

Regular Expressions in Matlab
Regular Expressions in SAP Routines (Converting dates, thousands separator,

A deep dive into Regular Expressions.

Regular Expressions in Wikipedia.
All you ever need to know from 4guysfromrolla

I can see this one being useful to translate the XML format that PEL rules are stored in back to a readable text interpretation... without using an HTML parser.

Removing All HTML Tags from a String Using Regular Expressions

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/073000-1.shtml

These type of statements are great for enforcing some of your business rules/validation logic using a data-driven approach. 

UPDATE updateTable
SET ut.field1 = dbo.regexReplace( ut.field1, rt.regex, rt.replace, 1, 1 )
,ut.field2 = dbo.regexReplace( ut.field2, rt.regex, rt.replace, 1, 1 )
FROM updateTable AS ut
CROSS JOIN regexTable AS rt

DECLARE @strTest varchar(8000) SELECT @strTest = '\\servername\foldername99999\filename.ext' SELECT [Position]=PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]%', @strTest), [Before]=SUBSTRING(@strTest, 1, PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]%', @strTest)-1), [After]=SUBSTRING(@strTest, PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]%', @strTest), LEN(@strTest))

Regular Expressions to decompose MDX query

Regular expressions can be useful to decompose a MDX query (with elements explicitly defined, i.e. not using MDX functions) and retrieve involved objects (i.e. dimensions, levels, members, etc.). I often used them in performance improvement processes or for MDX pre-validation purpose.

How about being able to parse your calculated measures out of the MDX script used by the cube?

http://geekswithblogs.net/darrengosbell/archive/2006/08/10/87561.aspx

Or building some pattern filtering functionality using MDX stored procedures?

http://blogs.conchango.com/christianwade/archive/2006/04/30/3896.aspx

There's nothing stopping you from using the System.Text.RegularExpressions libary in Reporting Services functions either.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157328.aspx

Here is a good resource to better understand Regular Expressions.  There are plenty of possibilities - just make sure when you get this hammer, everything doesn't look like a nail.

The Regular Expressions cheat sheet is a one-page reference sheet. It is a guide to patterns in regular expressions, and is not specific to any single language.

Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet (V2) - Cheat Sheets - Added Bytes

Peter Eb. : When will data appear in the cube after a submit from the PPS Planning Business Client?

Once you’ve used the handy dandy Yellow Cell Checklist found here, how do you know when the data appeared in the database?

When will data appear in the cube after a submit from the PPS Planning Business Client?

Peter Eb. : When will data appear in the cube after a submit from the PPS Planning Business Client?

PPS SP2 and SQL 2008 revisited - Windows Live

How to install SQL 2008 with PerformancePoint.

After 2 days I finally figured out why the pps olap charts and grids would not work in my pure 2008 environment. Also proclarity.  You must install the SQL 2005 CU9 redists BEFORE installing SQL Server 2008. Here is the order of operations

• Install Windows Server 2008
  • add IIS and AppServer roles (incl. CGI, ASP, IIS6 mgmt)
• Install the 4 SQL 2005 CU9 redists
  • Sqlncli
  • SQLServer2005_ADOMD
  • SQLServer2005_ASOLEDB9
  • SQLServer2005_XMO
• Install SQL Server 2008
  • DB (incl. full text search for AdWorks sample), AS, RS
• Install MOSS 2007 SP1
  • Create SSP, site collection
• Install PPS 2007 RTM
  • do NOT run config mgr
  • install PPS SP2
    • run Config mgr
• Install PAS/Desktop
  • install SP2
• Install Visio, Office, etc

PPS SP2 and SQL 2008 revisited - Windows Live

Yellow Input Forms for the Assigner Check

Courtesy of Sundar in the Planning forums:

Follow the steps for the reviewer to display the editable cells:

Connect to the Server and Select the Assignments
Select "Select Review or approver submission of this form link"
Highlight the User Row with Status Submitted to enable the 3rd Icon with pencil
Select the Pencil Icon to open the assignments
New Assignment window with Yellow color writeable region is displayed
Refer to PerformancePoint Add-In for Excel Online Help on Assignments

BET: Microsoft Excel Formulas - 3D Formulas

Creating a Summary worksheet (Cube) directly in Excel. 

As you move to PerformancePoint for reporting, this scenario will hopefully be less relevant.

But what if you have 25 worksheets and you need to sum up the same fields in all of them on a consolidation worksheet.

Named ranges and colons are your friend.

What is a 3D Formula ?

These are also known as cubed formulas.

A reference that refers to the same cell or range on multiple worksheets is called a 3D reference.

Using 3D formulas allows you to calculate data thorughout a workbook using multiple worksheets.

All 3D formulas are based on the syntax: Sheet1:Sheet4!A2:B5.

A 3D formula is a formula that refers to the same cell (or range of cells) on multiple worksheets.

The 3D formula "=SUM(Sheet1:Sheet4!A2)" can be used to add up the numbers in cell "A2" on 4 different worksheets.

BET: Microsoft Excel Formulas - 3D Formulas

Download details: PPS 2007 SP2: Data Import Wizard

 

PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP2: Data Import Wizard

Brief Description

The Data Import Wizard enables users to configure and move data from source systems into Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Download details: PPS 2007 SP2: Data Import Wizard

Nugget: Stop a rule in PerformancePoint while running

When you run rules, there is no option to cancel in the Business Modeller.  There are a few solutions for killing rules while running.

1. Kill the SQL process (sp_who2, kill ##) of the rule. (SQL implementation)

2. Kill the Analysis Services process of the rule. http://www.codeplex.com/MSFTASProdSamples.

3. IISReset.

4. SQL / SQL Analysis Services Reset.

5. (Possibly) kill w3wp.exe process.

All are brute-force methods highlighting the fact that you are probably not meant to stop rules while they are running. :)

Welcome to the PerformancePoint Planning Business Rules Development Guide

The Most Popular Microsoft Certification Exams in October 2008 | Jack’s Blog

The 640+ certified PerformancePoint Specialists will soon have company.

Microsoft Top 13 Microsoft Certification Exams List:

1. .html">70-285:MCSE Designing a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Organization
2. .html">70-442:Designing and Optimizing Data Access by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is in development
3. .html">MB7-517:NAV 5.0 Installation & Configuration
4. .html">70-556:TS: Ms Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, Applications
5. .html">70-089:Planning, Deploying, and Managing Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003

The Most Popular Microsoft Certification Exams in October 2008 | Jack’s Blog

Financial Systems and Business Intelligence: PerformancePoint Server - Balancing Your Actuals

 

Be sure to budget time to create variance reports for proper data validation when planning any data project.

PerformancePoint Server - Balancing Your Actuals

If like me, you are loading your actuals from your ERP system in PerformancePoint Server Planning, it helps to check your figures to make sure that they always balance. Now every good accountant will tell you that your trial balance must always balance to zero. This goes for each period and off course year to date. I have written some reports that self balance our system but in general here is the manual leg work behind it.

Financial Systems and Business Intelligence: PerformancePoint Server - Balancing Your Actuals

TechNet Virtual Labs: Office

 

A couple helpful ones here…

TechNet Virtual Lab: PerformancePoint Server 2007- Designing a Budgeting Model

TechNet Virtual Lab: PerformancePoint Server 2007- Monthly Reporting

TechNet Virtual Labs: 2007 Microsoft Office System

Get hands-on with the key features and components of the 2007 Microsoft Office system and learn the benefits of deploying it within your organization. Walk through installation, configuration and the new components around enterprise features administration, collaboration, business intelligence, and experience common deployment and integration scenarios that can help you make better choices when planning your roll-out.

TechNet Virtual Labs: Office

PerformancePoint SP2 is out!

Be sure to apply the “Pre-Service Pack 2 Update”

PPS 2007 SP2: Application Database Pre-Service Pack 2 Update

The Application Database Pre-Service Pack 2 Update resolves an issue that prevents PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP2 from updating the Application database.

Microsoft Download Center Search Results

Tips from PerformancePoint Planning Series I Course

I'm teaching a PerformancePoint Planning course this week with a colleague from my company.  Here are some tips that may help implementations, some added from previous postings, others discussed in forums, others discussed in the class:

Calendar

Note that the calendar cannot be changed for an application once it is created. (Time Dimension)  Plan carefully!

Model Type

As with Calendar, Model Type is not something you can change, though you could add or remove rules from other model types to make them similar...

Schedule a Job

Is really just "create a job" which could be scheduled or run manually.

Associations

Are really just hidden model rules... sometimes it might be better to roll your own rather than using the associations section.

Input Forms

http://performancepointing.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-aren-my-input-form-cells-turning.html 

Why aren't my input form cells turning yellow?

A colleague of mine offers this troubleshooting checklist when you just can't get the PerformancePoint Planning Excel Add-in to recognize input boxes in an assignment.

PerformancePoint Planning - Input Forms Checklist

1. The current date is within the Assignment start/end date/time
2. The cells you are looking at are within the start and end periods for the assignment (that you selected from the time dimension)
3. The scenario you are trying to input to is the scenario you selected for the cycle that the assignment is using
4. You have a value selected for every dimension in the model (both filters, rows and columns) and that the value selected is at the leaf level
5. The user you are logged on as has access to the model set to “On” in the summary view of the user’s role.
6. That read/write access is enabled for all of the dimensions selected in the filters/rows/columns you selected above.
7. The status of the assignment is listed as “started” or “partial”, not “Not Started” or “Submitted”, or something else.
8. That the assignment is opened using the assignment list in the action pane or from the assignment search window.
9. That the report property “Allow data entry” is set to true
10. That you haven’t mistakenly changed the format of a data entry to a white background (this has happened).  Check this using the “Home” ribbon and going to cell styles.  Right click on the “PerformancePoint data entry cell” to modify if necessary.  This can be testing by trying to write to the cell –if you don’t get a “read-only” error you’re fine.

And a few new ones.

11. The cycle you have created uses the same model as the assignment's forms.

12. The cycle you have created starts before the current date and ends 1 day after the current date (depending on your cycle configuration.)

13. The roles that the user you are logged on as do not have read/write access turned off for the dimension members selected to input, as any role with this will override a permitting role. (similar to 6)

14. That you have refreshed the offline assignment under Work Offline - Manage offline Assignments.

Dynamic Dates in Reports

Use the Current Period Reference in the time dimension of reports to dynamically change report date ranges.  Static examples from the course are not as maintainable, especially for monthly cycles.

Cycles

Only one role/user can be assigned to a cycle template.  Multiple users/roles can be assigned to an instance.

Might want to name cycles like YYYY-MODEL-SCENARIO-DESCRIPTION

Security And Roles

For Business Unit security - Create a master role with read/write access to all business units.  Add all users to this role.  Treat it as a 'mailing/distribution list' used specifically for creating the cycle instance and assigning it to the role. 

Create separate roles for each business unit contributor making an assignment.  Deny access to units that you do not want them to have access to.

Create another role "Lockout" or "Disabled Users" with no access to anything.  Add users to this role to disable access to models.  Deny overrides any other access they may have.

Do not specify User Customized Permissions. (Performance Hit).    Use increased number of roles instead.

Excel Add-In

Cut-pasting the matrix from Report-Properties may throw an error if dimension filters exist.  Edit the dimension filters under report properties to include name, label syntax same as original matrix.  Ensure that all properties match original matrix.

Rules

Use Active column to disable rules when performance problems exist.  Test model performance without any rules.  SQL Rules should be scoped very tightly, MDX rules should be scoped very broadly.

Use variables to store start and end dates for rules instead of current period reference.  Additional flexibility.

PPSCMD.EXE

Creating a job of jobs. (Courtesy Jeffrey Wang, Technet forums)

Well, its not impossible, its just not documented - but i guess that also means use it with care =)

If you use .Net Reflector, you can browse into the PPSCmd itself and see that it actually has some hidden commands inside. One such magical command is the ImportXml that takes an xml file descibing the jobs you want to run.

Create a XML file with the following content in your context:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Root xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/performancepoint/2007/03/MigrationDefinition">
  <Applications>
    <Application Id="GUID" Label="AppLabel" Name="AppName">
      <ImportCommands>
        <Command xsi:type="LaunchJob" Name="JobLabel">
        </Command>
      </ImportCommands>
    </Application>
  </Applications>
</Root>

Next, call it:

PPSCmd importXml /server http://server:46767 something.xml

Make sure you do not have have rules that are NativeMdx or NativeSQL implementation as this will disable the EnableNativeMdxSQLRule on the application.

Once you have it running, you can schedule this to run in SQL Agent - full scheduling to your heart's desire.

PerformancePoint Planning - Analysis Services

Use SQL Profiler to connect to Analysis Services to identify query problems and issues with caching, or just to see what it's doing in the background while it's not "rendering the matrix".  You may be able to tweak aggregations using Aggregation Manager, though you will probably need to do this on every deploy.  Analysis Services should be on at least one separate server in the architecture for memory and performance reasons.

PerformancePoint Exam 70-556 Outline

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-556.mspx

The Microsoft ProClarity Team Blog : ProClarity 6.3 SP2 (build 2217) Documenation

Proclarity 6.3 SP2 is out, and still doesn't play very well with Sharepoint 2007 on Windows 2008.. but hey, you should be scaling out right?

Attached is the Requirements.doc for the ProClarity 6.3 SP2 (build 2217) release. This document is being posted here because it will not be available via KB article for another couple of weeks.  The SP2 bits are available at http://download.microsoft.com.  Still to come later are the "Installing ProClarity 6.3 SP2 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008" and "ProClarity 6.3 SP2 readme.docx" files.  We'll post these as soon as possible. 

The Microsoft ProClarity Team Blog : ProClarity 6.3 SP2 (build 2217) Documenation

Filtering Unneeded Dimension Members in PerformancePoint Filters - SQL Server Central

 

Sometimes we need to utilise dynamic dimension security in an Analysis Services solution and we also need to display dynamically the allowed members in a PerformancePoint filter.

Filtering Unneeded Dimension Members in PerformancePoint Filters - SQL Server Central

Aurelien Koppel: Blog technique sur PerformancePoint Server (PPS)

Advantages of Proclarity vs. Excel... in French.

Proclarity 6.3 et Excel 2007 permettent à leurs utilisateurs de réaliser des rapports ad-hocs fondés sur des cubes Analysis Services (SSAS).

Aurelien Koppel: Blog technique sur PerformancePoint Server (PPS)

PerformancePoint Planning: Deleting a Custom Member Property - A Solution - Sacha Tomey's blog

Some sample code to get started building your own PerformancePoint Planning add-in in C#... or at least one feature of it.

Below is some really rough and ready C# code that actually does delete a dimension member property.  I will improve the code and probably add it in to my PPSCMD GUI interface as a 'feature pack' bonus at some stage, however, if you are in desperate need for the code to delete a member property, and you can't wait for PPSCMD GUI v0.2 or PerformancePoint Version 2 (I'm not sure which will come first !) the code is below (Use at your own risk !!)

PerformancePoint Planning: Deleting a Custom Member Property - A Solution - Sacha Tomey's blog

So.... you want to use the PerformancePoint web service so you can extend PerformancePoint, and integrate it into bespoke applications and SharePoint.

The PerformancePoint Planning Web Service

The Microsoft PerformancePoint Team Blog : Creating Excel and PowerPoint Documents Using PerformancePoint

Still very relevant.

Creating Excel and PowerPoint Documents Using PerformancePoint

Eric Friedrichsen  (ericfr@microsoft.com)

Microsoft Corporation

August 2007

Applies to:
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007

The Microsoft PerformancePoint Team Blog : Creating Excel and PowerPoint Documents Using PerformancePoint

Microsoft Dynamics CEE Blog : Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Monitoring and Analytics Sample

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server is a performance management application that helps users monitor the performance of their organizations, analyze the results, and make effective business decisions.

The Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 sample contains a sample Microsoft Dynamics AX data cube and two sample dashboards that are based on the information. One is an executive overview dashboard and the other a drill down into the General Ledger information. You can reuse these dashboards on your own Microsoft Dynamics AX cubes if you desire by following the instructions included with the sample.

Microsoft Dynamics CEE Blog : Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Monitoring and Analytics Sample

The Other James Brown : Single View Platform

It’s not the Unified Dimension Model that’s the focus at Microsoft any more… it’s the Single View Platform.  It’s not just Analysis Services on top of SQL Server to centralize your data, it’s Virtual Earth and PerformancePoint, tied into Sharepoint, to offer a comprehensive “Single View” of the world.

The Single View Platform is not a new product in itself, but rather a group of existing products brought together under a banner for a specific problem domain (like CSP).  For SVP it brings in Virtual Earth, SQL, SharePoint, PerformancePoint and a whole host of other products.  The advantages of this approach were rather nicely summed up on another blog:

For those of us who have chosen the Microsoft platform, the good news is that we have many products from which to choose. Microsoft has an array of server and client products, as well as online services, that cover everything from collaboration to commerce, business intelligence to geographical information systems, personal productivity to accounting.
Sometimes the sheer number of choices can be daunting, so Microsoft is initiating new offerings that help us weave the various products into cohesive solutions. The goal is to bridge the gaps between product groups and provide additional documentation and code to integrate multiple Microsoft products.

Very nicely put!  I really hope that we see more of these frameworks from Microsoft.  They allow us tackle a problem by grouping a set of our products together, and then producing documentation, guidance, demos, samples and so forth directed at solving the specific problem space.

The Other James Brown : Single View Platform

PerformancePointy : PerformancePoint Monitoring + Silverlight: KPIs and Scorecards

 

PerformancePoint Monitoring + Silverlight: KPIs and Scorecards

PerformancePoint Monitoring doesn't have as robust a prescription as Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint, but yes, PerformancePoint Monitoring & Silverlight can be used together.

PerformancePoint dashboards are SharePoint web part pages, so web parts or master pages using Silverlight for menus, visualization, charting, or any other thing, are right at home in (or surrounding) a PerformancePoint dashboard.

Another integration point is the web service PmService.asmx. You can learn more about this service through PerformancePoint SDK documentation of its client proxy. In this article we’ll call the GenerateView method of this service to retrieve and work with a scorecard/KPI data set, and visualize that data in Silverlight 2.

PerformancePointy : PerformancePoint Monitoring + Silverlight: KPIs and Scorecards

PerformancePoint Server Information by Ajay Singh

Details on Consolidation from the BI VPC 6.0.

How Consolidation works in Performance Point Server:

Financial model with shares consolidation: This uses financial model with shares since it requires ownership information which derives from the shares calculation. There are five rules templates for statutory consolidation in FI. They are Inter-company rule for Profit/Loss, Inter-company rule for investment, Inter-company rule for Equity and Inter-company rule for Balance Sheet. One can map a leaf account to the model property that used by the rule. The leaf account will then be used for calculating minority interest, investment and elimination related transactions. Users can also write their own rules to accommodate more statutory requirements. The financial model with shares consolidation only supports one level entity hierarchy, and shares calculation will generate all the ownership information for each entity relative to the parent entity which in term generates a flat hierarchy.

If company A owns 90% of company B, there will be two leaf entities (company B and company A) and one consolidated entity Consol. After shares calculation company A has holding consolidation method and company B has Full consolidation method. Once the method is determined for each entity within the hierarchy, we need to load fact table data for each leaf entity. Consolidation process involves the following three steps:

1. Shares Calculation: To calculate the ownership and control for each sub entity.
2. Reconciliation (optional): To record any difference occurred between inter companies.
3. Consolidation: To record elimination for inter-company transactions based on the type of the accounts, consolidation methods and flow type (for BS accounts only).
4. Currency Conversion (optional): Consolidation can also do currency conversion but it’s optional.

Financial model without shares consolidation: This uses financial model without shares since we assume 100% ownership between parent and child entities. The model property Consolidation Balance Account is used to record the elimination for each account. Non statutory consolidation supports staged hierarchy so that parent entities can have multiple levels. The 100% elimination will take place for all the intercompany transactions.

PerformancePoint Server Information by Ajay Singh

PerformancePoint Server Information by Ajay Singh: InterCompany Reconciliation

I don’t usually ask myself questions, but if I did it would probably be “Self, what is an Offset Account” if I had to work with the Financials with Shares model in PerformancePoint Planning.

You may be asking yourself, “Self, what is an Offset Account? What is a Balancing Account for that matter?” Well, when an IC reconciliation job runs it looks at the difference between the values recorded by the buyer and the seller. In this case, the seller recorded the transaction at $50.00 higher than the buyer. IC reconciliation always assumes the buyer’s value is correct and so we must reduce the seller’s value by 50 bucks. The offset account (that we set in the model properties) is considered a “seller’s account” so adding -$50.00 will bring the whole shebang into balance. But, our ancient Greek accounting rules tell us that we need to record a double entry for this transaction. Enter: the balancing account. The balancing account will always get a double-entry for the same amount and opposite sign as the offset account.

PerformancePoint Server Information by Ajay Singh: InterCompany Reconciliation

What is PerformancePoint?

Do you know what Microsoft PerformancePoint is? 

I think of Microsoft PerformancePoint as a combination "all-in-one", "do-it-yourself with a bit of help" planning, analyzing, reporting, scorecard and dashboard creating suite from Microsoft with Excel, Sharepoint, and Web functionality.  It helps you to capture and analyze your data.  It integrates multiple Microsoft products into a single common theme of _Business Intelligence_.

It's kind of like a swiss-army knife for BI, but with power tools instead of a fork or toenail clippers.

There are many components of PerformancePoint drawn together from creations of Microsoft's development teams, acquisitions, and licenses of 3rd-party tools.  Proclarity, Business Scorecard Manager, Biz #, FRx, to name a few.  Planning, Monitoring, and Analyzing.

There's a lot to cover if you want to know all there is to know about PerformancePoint.

PerformancePoint is not:

• A server performance optimization tool (though it does allow for data analysis to optimize performance)
• A load testing tool.
• A tool to speed up your computer (in fact, it requires some serious resources and server-class machines if you want the entire suite installed along with SQL Server, Sharepoint, and lots of enterprise data)
• An add on for Microsoft Surface.
• It is not a Master Data Management Tool, though you could probably turn it into one.  There was some speculation that the Stratature acquisition would provide PerformancePoint with an MDM tool.  Instead, this falls into the Sharepoint camp.
• It does not support SQL Server 2008 (until you apply the service pack that is coming soon!), though parts will still function.   The Planning component of PerformancePoint uses MDX and Analysis Services extensively, which apparently doesn't translate very well in the SQL 2008 world of MDX.

What is PerformancePoint? 

• It falls under the Office Server suite of products, though it could just as easily have fallen under SQL Server's umbrella due to its close ties with the database and tight integration with Analysis Services.
• It is the client tool that Microsoft was missing when browsing OLAP cubes. (Pivot tables in Excel 2000 were not much fun, though they are much better in Excel 2007.)
• It is the data entry tool for Excel that Microsoft was missing for planning submission and workflow. (Spreadmarts are not much fun.)

I enjoy word analysis more than number-crunching, as words can be beautiful and numbers are just... well... numbers.  Wordle is one of my favourite "tag cloud" tools for creating these word visualizations.

PerformancePoint, as defined by the search terms accessing this blog.

	There seems to be a common theme here.  Let's filter out PerformancePoint, Sharepoint, Performance Point, and Server to see what the true story is.

  

As this is a blog, you're going to see terms like 'problem', 'failed', and msmdpump.dll' picked up from the search engines.  I had a few "head scratching" moments myself when trying to build my first model using PerformancePoint Planning, trying to create my first Dashboard using PerformancePoint Monitoring, and trying to get Proclarity Web Professional installed. 

Not to mention data integration. "createlabeltableformeasuregroup" anyone?

The purpose of this blog and my postings here, other than to capture every tidbit of internet knowledge around PerformancePoint, is to solve problems, turn failures into successes, and assist with configuring XML/A. :)

So that's how people got here.  But where is Microsoft going with this?

More from Directions On Microsoft.

Even though I try to keep track of all the goings-on with PerformancePoint here, Microsoft still is the best source of information.

Top 10 Benefits of Microsoft PerformancePoint
http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/productinfo/top10benefits.aspx

PerformancePoint Forums
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=517&SiteID=17

And mathematics can be beautiful too.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Stupid-Coding-Tricks-The-TSQL-Madlebrot.aspx

Wordle - Create

A solution to "An unexpected error has occurred" in WSS v3

 

Debugging SharePoint can be problematic at times, it does like to hide debugging information from you. The bain of my life recently has been “An unexpected error has occurred” with nothing written to log files, trace or the event log.

Normally I can debug the problem with a little commenting & narrowing down of the problem, but today I have managed to get rid of that error screen completely.

The solution is to change a single entry in web.config, by modifying the line…

<SafeMode MaxControls=“200“ CallStack=“false“…

to…

<SafeMode MaxControls=“200“ CallStack=“true“…

You will also need to set custom errors to 'Off' .

<customErrors mode=“Off“/>

You will no longer see the “An unexpected error has occurred” error page and instead you get a lovely ’standard ASP.Net error page’ with the stack trace and everything…development has got that little bit easier!!

A solution to "An unexpected error has occurred" in WSS v3

Justin T. Ho - Event Log Shows {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} and {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} Permission Errors with Sharepoint 2007 Search Engine Installed

 

If you notice this filling up the Windows Event Log, you may need to modify permissions within Component Services.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: DCOM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10016
User:  NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
Description:
The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230}
to the user NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20).  This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

Justin T. Ho - Event Log Shows {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} and {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} Permission Errors with Sharepoint 2007 Search Engine Installed

BeI - Microsoft Business Intelligence – Reporting Services 2008 & PerformancePoint

 

Here is another quick tip, Reporting Services 2008 would be fully supported using SP2 (see my previous post).
To those of you who need to use SSRS2008 today, using PPS SP1, here is a workaround:

Scenario: Integrating SSRS2008
1.  Set Server Mode to "Share Point Integrated"
2.  Type the SSRS2008 Report Server URL
3.  Set the Report name using Full Path description

 

BeI - Microsoft Business Intelligence

All About Annotations « Alan Whitehouse’s Ramblings

It would be great to have a way to enter text into a cell as something that could be captured and referenced from either the cube or a relational table.  This concept would fit well with the standard of variance explanations placed beside numbers.

After all, a number is only as useful as the story surrounding it.

Today I have decided to talk about the concept of Annotations.  Annotations are a nice feature of PerformancePoint, but there are some limitations to keep in mind.

All About Annotations « Alan Whitehouse’s Ramblings

BeI - Microsoft Business Intelligence

Lots of useful links here.  Many I already link to on the right hand links.

Since there are a lot of you out there looking for away in, I've decided to gather all my known links and recommendations to help you take your first steps. I've decided to call it the "Junkies List":

1. Taking the first steps: Adrian's Impressive Intro Tutorials (1-7):
   http://blogs.technet.com/datapuzzle/archive/2008/03/21/help-how-to-guides-manuals-forums-for-microsoft-office-performancepoint-server-2007.aspx
2. Level 100 – 200 : PPS – Planning On-Line raining
   http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/resources/training.aspx
3. Basics Concepts:
   http://blogs.adatis.co.uk/blogs/sachatomey/archive/2008/04/28/new-microsoft-insider-pps-planning-blog.aspx
4. XL-Add-ON
   http://blogs.msdn.com/petereb/default.aspx
5. Centeral Blog:
   http://adriandownes.blogspot.com/
6. Planning Server Forum:
   http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1871&SiteID=17
   
7. Paul Steynberg
   http://paulsteynberg.blogspot.com
8. Nick Barclay
   http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/
9. Jason Morales
   http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmorales/default.aspx
10. Peter Eb
    http://blogs.msdn.com/petereb/about.aspx
11. Sacha Tomey
    http://blogs.adatis.co.uk/blogs/sachatomey/archive/2008/04/28/new-microsoft-insider-pps-planning-blog.aspx
    During the coming weeks, I'll publish posts about in-depth Planning Development Issues. Have Fun and Be I,

BeI - Microsoft Business Intelligence