The trouble with data…

Microsoft announced  yesterday that the “Gemini” capabilities of Office 2010 / SQL Server 2008 R2 will be released under the brand, PowerPivot for Excel 2010… There’s a new site up and running dedicated to the product with little data as yet, however the Public Beta will be available in November.

PowerPivot

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…

Another key link for the 2010 Microsoft BI stack release wave

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Announcing SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements

Suppose you can’t really blame them for trying to get some mileage out of the recent PPS announcement from Microsoft (see previous blog post), but I found the tone of the email I received today from Panorama more than a little misleading

Microsoft announced last week that they will retire PerformancePoint as a standalone BI product. While some features will be embedded inside future releases of Microsoft Office and SharePoint many customers are concerned with the fact that Microsoft has given up on its strategy to be a major BI application player with dedicated BI products.

Now I spent some time on Sunday chatting through the implications of the announcement with an extremely trusted ex-colleague and member of the Microsoft Consulting Services Information Worker team.

My understanding is currently as follows

• Sure, for Planning, budgeting & forecasting the future is not Microsoft PerformancePoint – that WILL be effectively retired post SP3
• For dashboarding, reporting analytics and scorecarding this is most certainly not the case
• Microsoft have effectively with immediate effect given this functionality away as part of the Sharepoint e-cal licence
• It was always a separate application element of PPS so you need to think of it like another application service within MOSS (like Excel Services), effectively becoming PerformancePoint Services
• Further integration of PPS style reporting, dashboarding etc will come with Office14

For me, the move makes so much more sense. When we were looking at the MSFT stack, we were not interested in PPS planning (already having Cognos for that) and it seemed madness to pay £20k or so for the “other bit” of PPS we felt was missing from the MOSS/SSRS stack i.e. the old Proclarity Analytics Server functionality.

I do feel some sympathy for the shops and organisations that invested heavily in PPS Planning…

So it would seem according to Cindi Howson over at Intelligent Enterprise.

PerformancePoint was released with much fanfare in 2007 as having integrated planning (the big innovation), scorecarding (an enhanced version), and dashboarding (acquired from ProClarity). It turns out many customers only wanted the latter two components, which are more BI related. So now Microsoft is making it easier for customers to get these by including them in the SharePoint Enterprise license. Effective today, SharePoint enterprise customers can download PerformancePoint for free. Conversely, customers who bought PerformancePoint with software assurance can download SharePoint for free. What’s more, Microsoft added the following:

In the summer of 2009, we will release "Service Pack 3" for PerformancePoint Server 2007, which will include updates to the Planning module. From there we will focus our development on the new monitoring and analytic capabilities in "PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint" and will not offer standalone versions of PerformancePoint Server.

Microsoft says this is part of their strategy to have BI break that glass ceiling of 25% BI adoption and help make BI available to the masses. This is certainly good news for customers looking to add capabilities while saving on licensing costs. However, the various BI components (scorecard, dashboard, OLAP, reporting) products are not well integrated either from a technical perspective or from an end-user experience (yet). Cost of ownership goes well beyond licensing costs. But indeed licensing is the most notable out-of-pocket expense, and Microsoft’s approach to seeding the market has clearly been a successful strategy. In today’s economy, it’s a great move by Microsoft.

This is fairly big news in the current economic climate, especially for those of us that were not so interested in the Planning side of PPS (We use Cognos for that, which is not really in the scope of the current BI programme we’re running). Indeed, we were looking for a way to adopt some sort of visualization tool along the lines of the old Proclarity Analytics server without having to purchase the sledgehammer of PPS to crack the visualzation & analytical reporting gaps left by the alternative Reporting Services/Excel offering. So now maybe we can stop looking at expensive bolt-ons such as Excelsius and just add additional vizualization to Sharepoint.

This needs further investigation!

This is a weird one. One of our users is a member of the correct AD groups to be browser of the folder that the report browser web part points to, as well as browser of the reports in that folder. On browsing to the Sharepoint 2003 web page however, the default report viewer content renders but the report browser web part content does not, showing the following error

When the user clicks on the “Home” link in the report browser web part, the folders she has access to render correctly and she can then browse to the folder and get the list of reports. So why does the folder content not render when she first lands on the page ?? Must admit that for the moment this has us stumped – she can also browse directly to the folder on the report server.

We have no other reports of this so it would seem to be a really strange user issue. Bizarre!

If I ever get to the bottom of it I’ll let y’all know…. 

[Edit]

Found the issue after a mazy trail through the rs error log! Apparently, the user in question had set up an invalid subscription (somehow she managed to ask to be emailed on 01/01/0001 !!!) – once the offending subscription was deleted, the web part now renders fine…

One to add to the “weird & wonderfull SSRS issue” knowledge base me thinks

More of a link for myself than anything else, however for those of you having difficulty getting Excel workbooks containing external data connections to refresh in a MOSS 2007 Excel Services environment, this one is for you…