Downloadable implementation plans for PerformancePoint server 2007
A wealth of new content (templates, project plans and worksheets) has been made available on TechNet to assist partners and customers with implementing PerformancePoint Server 2007.
There are links to this content below:
Planning Design Configuration (template) (.docx) [Forthcoming]
Preliminary Requirements Gathering and Scoping Questionnaire (.docx)
Some useful tips for deploying Proclarity.
ProClarity Madness
This past few weeks were practically devoted to working on ProClarity BI solutions. The near heart-stopping moments came while implementing structural changes to the Time dimension and during the solution migration to the production server.
Implementing structural changes for OLAP cubes is straight-forward. The difficulties arise when we already have a lot of BI content (reports and analytics) created and almost all of them uses the Time dimension. With ProClarity, it can potentially disable all reports and analytics. Even with running the Missing Data Wizard will not be enough, as ProClarity Shared Items such as Dynamic Sets and KPI uses the Time dimension as well. The strategy that we used to resolve such change was:
ProClarity Dashobard & Analytics Server - Hierarchy Override
Got another undocumented feature for you, Hierarchy Override in PAS. I heard that there is a whitepaper out in the community somewhere but I was not able to find it.
I am working on a ProClarity dashboard and wanted to pass the dashboard parameter values down to the analyze links in each view on the dashboard. There is an advanced feature in the dashboard product that lets you do hierarchy overide through the Dashboard Studio GUI but that only applies to the actual view and not the Analyze URL. So I needed a way to do hierarchy override in the URL and pass down the current parm value. The answer is the undocumented S node. Let's say that we want to return the children of the selected parameter. The syntax would look something like this:
&expr=[[ProductParm:xml({0})]].CHILDREN
The "ProductParm" before ":xml" is the name of the dashboard parameter. The key to this syntax is the H attribute. You must specify which attribute hierarchy the MDX Set logic applies to. The whole purpose of the "parameter:xml" syntax is to make sure the selected value is properly encoded for both XML and HTML (primarily deals with the ampersand characters in the member names).Thanks to Jason Picker from Microsoft (ProClarity) for the help on this one.
