Norm's PerformancePoint Server Blog - New Whitepaper on Performance with PerformancePoint Planning

 

Introduction:

"Microsoft® Office PerformancePoint™ Server 2007 was designed as an infrastructure that includes everything between the server client tier and the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services cubes. It includes a run-time environment, APIs, scripts, configuration files, administrative functions, and a management console interface.

"This document describes the results of tests to measure scalability of Planning Server. The results of the tests confirm the following:

· Planning Server supports large numbers of business users, even when deployed on a conventional configuration consisting of four physical servers.

· Planning server performs well when additional server resources are added.

· Planning Server asynchronous implementation enhances performance and scalability.

"The test scenario described a typical corporate planning budgeting cycle with one data entry model. It had a large data set and was designed to provide unique security for a large number of users to ensure each component’s caching engine was working effectively."

Norm's PerformancePoint Server Blog

Beware When Creating the Application Calendar Using a Fiscal Year « Alan Whitehouse’s Ramblings

 

For the current PerformancePoint project I am on, the client runs a fiscal year that ends June 30th.  This is the first project where the client has not been on a calendar year.   I learned a valuable lesson today that will end up costing me about two-thirds of a days worth of work due to the fact that once the calendar is created, there are no changes allowed (whose stupid idea was that anyway?!?!).

Beware When Creating the Application Calendar Using a Fiscal Year « Alan Whitehouse’s Ramblings

Creating a Scorecard in PerformancePoint Server 2007 (PPS)

Nice walkthrough of creating a simple Scorecard in PerformancePoint.

Problem
We are just getting started with PerformancePoint Server 2007 and trying to help our business users to develop their first scorecard.  For those of you who are new to Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, PPS is a recent addition to the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offering.  PPS enables users to develop a variety of reports and scorecards, then compose them into a dashboard which is deployed to SharePoint.  Business users can then simply navigate to a URL in a SharePoint site to access the dashboard..  Can you help with some background on scorecards and also provide the detailed steps involved to develop a scorecard?

Creating a Scorecard in PerformancePoint Server 2007 (PPS)

Nick Barclay [MVP] BI-Lingual: Debugging Filter Links with Web Page Reports

I don't like it when functionality gets removed from an application.  Especially something as obvious as linking to external systems using a URL. Why can't there just be a globe with a link icon in PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer,   like Windows Live Writer?

Debugging Filter Links with Web Page Reports

Often when hooking up and testing dashboard filter links you may find the need to see precisely what value is being passed by that filter link. This becomes particularly urgent if you just can't figure out why things in your dashboard are not functioning the way you expect them to.

A few months ago the PPS team put out this post about using web page reports to mimic the absent OverridingURL functionality that used to exist in BSM. It is this technique that I have adapted to create a simple debug page to display the values a filter link passes across to other dashboard items.

Nick Barclay [MVP] BI-Lingual: Debugging Filter Links with Web Page Reports

Have Data Will Travel - Master Data Management

MDM is the concept of managing those "reference data" lookups that seem to plague all organizations.  Things like department structures, organizational and accounting hierarchies, product identifiers, campaign codes, application identifiers... anything which gets stored in a database, and a spreadsheet, and an email, and another spreadsheet, and then back into a database, then out to a reporting tool, then out to a spreadsheet, then out to Powerpoint, then out to an exec who says the data is all wrong and to start over.

You get the idea? 

MDM is supposed to solve this problem.  However, unlike all of these redundant "backups" of master data on various employee desktops, MDM could have the problem of Central Point of Failure, and this One Version of The Truth can quickly become worthless bytes on a disk if trust is lost in the accuracy of data.

Ownership, or Stewardship in this case makes a lot of sense.  Good article around MDM follows.

Data Stewardship is a key success factor – MDM systems make data quality and accuracy more important than ever because a mistake in master data can cause issues in all the systems that consume the data. While automated match-merge, standardization and data quality tools are becoming more capable all the time, at some point real human beings who are passionate about the data are required to make decisions that tools can make and monitor the processes to ensure that business rules and data standards are being enforced correctly. This is just one more example of the people aspects of MDM being as important as the technology. While processes, policies, governance, and standards are the real success factors, a good MDM hub can provide tools and capabilities that make a data steward’s job easier. Some of the more useful capabilities are business rule enforcement, workflow, versioning, searching, auditing, and eventing. The combination of the Microsoft MDM system and SharePoint supplies all of these capabilities and more.

Have Data Will Travel