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

The 6.3 Desktop Professional install will in some cases loop on the Microsoft Windows Installer 3.1 v2 and Microsoft XML 6.0, which are prerequisites for the install, when attempting to install on Windows 7. You get a continuous loop with the message

One or more of the installations required a reboot. Would you like to reboot now?

No matter how many times you reboot, it does not want to install.

The trick is to run the setup.exe program from the following installation location

Proclarity 6.3 setup.exe location

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!

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…

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!