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Whitepaper: Which Microsoft Business Intelligence tool to use and why

Russell — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 13:01:19 +0000

On his blog, Pej Javaheri (Microsoft BI PM) pointed to a new whitepaper which you can download here.

It’s titled “How to Choose the Right Business Intelligence Technology to Suit Your Style” and does a really good job of delineating different “styles” of BI, and then matching up the appropriate Microsoft BI tools to each style.

Since Microsoft has several tools that can build reports & dashboards, and they each have some overlapping functionality, it’s not uncommon for customers to ask:

“Which Microsoft BI tool should I use?”

Well, this relatively short whitepaper addresses that question quite nicely. BI professionals won’t see much here they don’t already know, but it’s a well organized write-up and is something I’m grateful for. I suspect I’ll be leaving this document with customers on a regular basis!

Enabling threaded discussions for PerformancePoint KPIs

Russell — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 15:18:07 +0000

PerformancePoint already supports the ability to add comments to KPIs which reside in a scorecard, and this is good.

However, several users that I’ve spoken to expect to see a little bit more here – after all, we’re inside SharePoint, aren’t we? Clients who have mentioned this want to take advantage of discussion lists and all the interesting stuff you can do with them.

Well, you can – with a little bit of work, of course. Let’s implement an example, shall we?

Dashboard Designer

While this little section isn’t completely necessary (you’ll see why later), I recommend you do it anyway.

Essentially, you’re going to want to add a custom property to each KPI. For example, take the Actual KPI.

In this Actual KPI, we’ve added a property called Discussion Property Value and plugged in an arbitrary value (in this case, the name of the KPI itself). We repeat this process for all our KPIs.

Here are our two sample KPIs sitting in a scorecard:

And here is the scorecard inside a dashboard, which we’re going to publish to SharePoint. Note the custom property hanging off the scorecard?:

SharePoint Team Discussion List

The next thing we’re going to create is a Team Discussion List. Because I’m lazy, I used one which was already part of my site. I added a discussion for each of the KPIs I thought might be discussed.

If you click any of the discussions, we’ll go into a nice threaded mode:

There are only a few wrinkles left to deal with. First, you’re going to want to create two new views for this list: A Subject view, and a Threaded view. You can take care of this by clicking the List tab on the SharePoint Ribbon while viewing the team discussion list. Then, click List Settings on the ribbon itself.

Towards the bottom of the Settings dialog, you can click Create View. When you create the Threaded view, make sure you set it as Default with the Make this default view option. I’d personally suggest you edit and then delete any of the other views you see.

To make the magic happen, we’re going to need to add a metadata column to the list. On the List Settings page, find the Columns list. Click Create Column and add a column with what you feel is an appropriate name: I used “Discussion” and set it as a Single line of text.

After you’ve taken care of these chores, you’ll add your discussions, just like I did. You will need to create them in advance. Make sure you fill in your equivalent of the Discussion field with the same values stored in KPI custom property values.

Creating Connections

Next, it’s time to add the discussion list to your dashboard page and connect it to your scorecard:

1. Navigate to the published dashboard page inside SharePoint and from the Site Actions menu, choose Edit Page.

2. Click Add a Web Part inside the zone you want you add your discussion list to.

3. Find the Team Discussion List Web Part in the Lists and Libraries folder and Add it to your page. I found that I had to click the small black -> arrow in the Web Parts list to find the thing.

4. Next, click the caret on your scorecard, choose Connections | Send Filter Values To | Team Discussion.

5. In the 2. Configure Connection tab, click Add Connection.

6. Select your Custom Property Name in the Source Value drop-down. Earlier in this entry I mentioned that adding the custom property to your KPI was optional, and this is the step where you see how it is used. You still could get this to work without a custom property name by binding to the KPI Name property. However at that point you’d need to make sure that your KPI names match the value you plugged into the SharePoint List metadata column. I thought it was more flexible not to rely on the KPI name to get things working.

7. Select your SharePoint metadata column in the Connect To drop-down.

8. Click OK, and you’re done.

As you click a KPI in the scorecard, you’ll see the list get filtered by your selection. If you click a specific discussion, it’ll open in threaded mode and you can discuss away.

We can do better

What we have so far is pretty good, but we can do better. I personally don’t like the fact that when I click on a discussion item, we navigate to the discussion in the current window and I “lose” the dashboard page. I’d prefer to have a distinct “discussion window” open for me to do my arguing.

Making this modification to SharePoint involves some hardcore MOSS hacking skills, and I have to admit that my Kung Fu is not strong enough in this regard.

I found the style template for the Team Discussion List inside \14\Templates\Features\DiscussionList, and I think I need to inject target=”_blank” into one of the elements like this one (or maybe the JS function which launches the specific discussion):

>![CDATA[" onclick='javascript:GotoDiscussion("]]

But, that’s as far as I can get – there are some examples out there on addressing this in SharePoint 2003 and even 2007, but they don’t apply for 2010.

I’m HOPING some SharePoint guru with time to kill may see this post and help us out there. If I do get a hand, I’ll update the post and let you know who our hero is

How to manually install PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer

Russell — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:38:02 +0000

In 2010, the install point of PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer isn’t overly discoverable, but Microsoft has done a good job documenting how to get the thing loaded. Most of the time, our instructions tell you to go to a BI Center site, and in

A Microsoft guy does QlikView. Part II – dashboards

Russell — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:56:24 +0000

On to dashboards! In my previous post, I touched on building out a data model in QlikView. In this post, we’ll cover using it by building “sheets” (like PerformancePoint dashboard pages or PowerPivot worksheets). I suspect I’ll get

A Microsoft guy does QlikView

Russell — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 22:37:13 +0000

Over the holidays, I decided to experiment with some business intelligence technology that I normally don’t have the opportunity work with – QlikTech’s QlikView. In a nutshell, I took Microsoft’s Contoso Retail sample DW, brought portions

Problem: MOSS Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) & PerformancePoint Reporting Services Reports

Russell — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:25:47 +0000

(This refers to MOSS 2010 and PPS V2) Today I needed to make an internal PPS demo available via the internet, so some alternate access mapping within SharePoint was in order. I added an AAM entry for my default web site, essentially converting

PerformancePoint Server SP3 hits the streets

Russell — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:19:42 +0000

The title says it all!

x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=90c596a5-aca4-4ded-9072-facf834bc0c6&displaylang=en x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3ad75ae5-d2cd-4953-87cf-5f74d79804c6&di

PerformancePoint: Fix slow rendering dashboard issues with Internet Explorer 8!

Russell — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:35:35 +0000

I'm currently working on a project which leverages many PerformancePoint reports. The dashboards I've built use a fair number of analytic chart report objects on a single dashboard page (at least 4, sometimes more). When I ran many of these pag

My thoughts on PerformancePoint Planning’s sunset

Russell — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:59:40 +0000

As a BI Technical Specialist at Microsoft, PPS is (was?) my bread and butter - It’s how I eat. So the changes to the Microsoft’s strategy around the product hit pretty close to home for me. (What? You don’t know what they are? Go here.) And

PerformancePoint Server SP2 is here.

Russell — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:26:39 +0000

OK, I was a few days off on my guesstimate....and the landing page I pointed to earlier still doesn't have links directly to the files...but SP2 was released late yesterday afternoon and can be downloaded here (x86) and here (x64) There's also ton