The trouble with data…

I know that Microsoft have promised that they will be playing catch up later this year in terms of Mobile BI, and for sure they need to. Offerings available right now from the likes of Cognos, QlikView, Business Objects and Microstrategy (current personal favourite) far outstrip what you can do with the current Microsoft stack. But what does work?

Well, from what I can see, anything Sliverlight based is out, so that rules out PowerView and Decomp Trees in PPS. It seems that most of the other things work though, so there’s much you can still do.

Having managed to blag a company iPad in my new role as Reporting & Analytics lead, I figured I’d hook it up to the MSFT 2008R2 demo server I built that currently hosts some of Logica’s Spark Centre demos. Having installed Junos Pulse, a VPN app that allows me to securely connect to my work network, I found that the Sharepoint “pretend Telco” site renders quite well on the iPad.

Firstly, I checked out SSRS… There’s no right click on iPad so you need to hit the screen over any drop downs and wait a moment for the selections to pop up.

Looks pretty good… Next was PPS – remember, no Silverlight and doesn’t look like drill downs are fully working, but still able to do things like selecting chart items, changing from chart to grid and most impressively, export to Excel and PowerPoint works just fine (providing you have an Office programme installed such as QuickOffice, Docs to Go etc). Click Export to Excel and you get a choice..

And here’s the report in QuickOffice

Last thing to try was Excel services. Here, the Open in Excel function does not work. Apparently, there is no fooling it in to accepting being opened in a cheap substitute but the charts look OK…

So, not perfect, but not all despair, and I’m assured that there are lots of goodies to come later in the year once the SQL2012 launch is out of the way. Still, it will need to be good to match my current favourites… If you get the chance, have a look at the Microstrategy iPad app….

And the nice app from RoamBI

This is a pretty good resource for those people wanting to get started with the latest versions of the Microsoft BI stack.

Download details: SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Kit (January 2011 Update)

Sadly, out of the box, you can’t connect from BIDS 2008 (the SQL 2008 or 2008 R2 version) to TFS 2010. I guess this will come with Denali where hopefully the new Juneau Development Environment will be integrated with TFS 2010.

I managed to get SQL Server 2008 R2 BI development tools (BIDS 2008) to work with TFS 2010 by doing the following:

 1. Install BI Development Tools that come with SQL Server 2008 R2

2. Install VS2008 Team Explorer (for BIDS/VS2008 from MSFT available here)

3. Install VS2008 Service Pack 1 (available here)

4. Install  VS2008 SP1 Forward Compatibility Update for TFS 2010 (available here)

Once I had done that, I was able to connect to a TFS 2010 Project and successfully check VS2008 projects in and out of source control, raise bugs etc.

Have attached a few screen grabs showing the integration from BIDS and also from the Web Client Portal (basically Sharepoint for TFS) showing some of the out of the box dashboard stuff.

Note that when entering a TFS server to connect to in BIDS, a change from TFS 2008 means that you now need to fully qualify your TFS Project

When asked for which TFS Server to connect to, type http://VM2008BITFS:8080/TFS (assuming you use default ports etc)

Team Web Access in TFS 2010

Portal Dashboard in TFS 2010

BIDS check-in & source control access (similar to TFS 2008)

There’s a great resource for those people whose company can’t (or won’t) pay for training in these cash-strapped times

How Do I BI?

Check them out!

I had yet another “incident” today that left me a little flustered whilst trying to do what i would regard as simple stuff with PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer – trying to display an SSRS report on a dashboard page when the report server is in Sharepoint Integrated mode. Fairly simple once you have it worked out but certainly not intuitive and there’s precious little documentation surrounding it.

Anyway… on to the issue & resolution.

To display an SSRS report in a dashboard page, first we need to add a new report, choosing SQL Server Report as the type (see left hand pic below)

Now we can move on to selecting the report server location and the report we want to display. This is not as easy as it sounds – for example in BIDS, we would normally apply our integrated Sharepoint site as the TargetServerURL as per right hand picture above. Note how we use essentially the same URL for the report destination location as we do the TargetServerURL, in my case the is in the format http://myportal.mydomain.local…

So, now we get to PPS and I was expecting things to be pretty similar when faced with the following configuration panel – but no. Actually what we have to

do is to enter the actual reportserver virtual directory URL as opposed to your Sharepoint Portal root site (as you would in BIDS). Notice how the Report Server URL in PPS is in the format

http://reporting.mydomain.local/reportserver

whereas in BIDs for Sharepoint integrated mode it was

http://myportal.mydomain.local

So let’s hope that this is some functionality that becomes more consistent as the disparate platforms (PPS/MOSS/SQL etc) get developed further, as it sure is frustrating to try to second guess these issues when jumping between the different dev environments. So if you are trying to deploy SSRS reports within PPS dashboards to a portal where SSRS is running in Sharepoint Integrated mode and keep getting error messages like the one below – now you know what the issue might be…

Hope this helps…

Having just installed the August CTP of SQL Server 2008 (R2) it was mentioned in the notes that it comes with ReportBuilder 3.0 that has the added functionality of being able to map spatial data (amonst other things).

It IS included with the install, however it’s not immediately obvious where… does not appear on list of newly installed programs etc etc….

If you install the report server you will see that it can be installed “out of the box” as a click-once install from the report server home page Http://yourreportserver/reports (the default) by clicking the icon labelled “New Report in Report Builder”…. simples yes?

Click Once Installation

Now RTM, SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1

Download Here

Summary Functionality:

• Slipstream – You are now able to integrate the base installation with service packs (or Hotfixes) and install in a single step.
• Service Pack Uninstall – You are now able to uninstall only the Service Pack (without removing the whole instance)
• Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability