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

PerformancePoint, Azure and SQL Reporting Downloads from Microsoft | SharePoint BUZZ - Your SharePoint Community Resource

 

Downloads available from Microsoft:

• PerformancePoint Server 2007 Contoso Demo Data - contains data for the Contoso application of PerformancePoint Planning and workspace of Monitoring and Analytics. This demo application was designed to illustrate real-world business scenarios on performance management areas like statutory consolidation, Planning/Budgeting/Forecasting, KPI, scorecard, dashboard etc.
• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio October 2008 CTP - for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure
• Windows® Azure Software Development Kit (October 2008 CTP) - provides developers with the APIs, tools, documentation, and samples needed to develop Internet-scale applications that run on Windows Azure
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies - a Web download that provides features for running a report server within a larger deployment of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

PerformancePoint, Azure and SQL Reporting Downloads from Microsoft | SharePoint BUZZ - Your SharePoint Community Resource

Performance Point Server SP2 pre-release nuggets - BeI - Microsoft Business Intelligence

 Best news I have heard in awhile – the long-awaited SP2 for Performance Point Server 2007 is coming out… before the New Year?

Performance point server SP2 is planned to be release on December 2008.
We are currently waiting for the beta version, due in a couple of days.

The dev team has relased some nuggets regarding the upcoming release:
1. The support for SQL Server 2008 has been established:
    a. SSRS report view now supports the SSRS2008 connection.
    b. Setup up over SQL Server 2008
2. Support for virtualization environments:
    As previously mentioned by Norm's blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/normbi/archive/2008/10/14/performancepoint-server-sp2-hyper-v-is-supported.aspx
   Performance Point Server would support virtualization (using Hyper-V),
   you can read further about it at:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=957006
    Since Planning Server requires wide topology, this issue could change the future architecture of planning implementation.

Performance Point Server SP2 pre-release nuggets - BeI - Microsoft Business Intelligence

B.I. the way...

Some more documentation coming shortly.

The Planning Business Modeler topics are now "out of the box". These topics are organized by category rather than table of contents. The content is very good. In coming weeks, we will cross-reference between TechNet and Office Online so that customers have a better experience (less fragmented) reading our documentation.  

• Overview
• Getting started
• Accessibility
• User interface
• Concepts
• How do I
• Assignments
• Jobs
• Associations
• Assumptions
• Business rules
• Business rules tasks | Business rules overview | Business rules templates | More...
• Cycles
• Dimensions
• Predefined dimensions
• Models and model sites
• Forms and reports
• Planning an application
• Process scheduling
• Security and Roles

B.I. the way...

PerformancePoint Install - Failed Windows Server 2003 SP1 - Dan Lewis

 

Work Around:

You can run the following commands to install PerformancePoint making it ignore the prerequisites check, and ultimately enabling the 'Next' button.

To skip check for Planning Server:

MSIEXEC /i PPLSrv.msi SKIPREQCHECK=1

To skip check for Monitoring Server:

MSIEXEC /i PSCSrv.msi SKIPREQCHECK=1

PerformancePoint Install - Failed Windows Server 2003 SP1 - Dan Lewis