CU8 was relaeased yesterday for download here. Question is, has it been tested with PerformancePoint SP1? As soon as I know, I’ll post more here:

Update (6/18/2008): One of my customers wanted to know about this, and here’s the deal: SP1 got the full testing treatment against CU3, and also a wee bit was done against CU 7. Use your judgement.

As many of you know, Microsoft has a super-duper-fantastic (and free) VPC that you can download with all of our BI goodness pre-installed and configured. It’s called the “AllUp BI” VPC, and if you want more details, do a bit of reading here.

I use this image as a primary demo platform and have 3-4 different “hacked” versions of it on various machines I run. Because it is a totally self-contained system, this server acts as its own domain controller, which is a problem as far as PerformancePoint Server is concerned. PPS doesn’t support being installed on a DC, even though you can get it to work anyway.

I discovered yesterday that if you do install PPS on a DC, you’re going to run into problems getting service packs and hotfixes installed, too.

When attempting to deploy a particular hotfix I needed, the distro threw this error:

Failed package requirement analysis

Thanks to a couple guys here at Microsoft who reminded me that AllUp is a DC and offered a workaround, I was able to get back up and rolling quickly. Essentially, you’ll just need to run the .msp which is complaining from the command-line with a parameter that tells it to skip prerequsiste checking.

I’m my case, PPLSrv.msp /SKIPREQCHECK=1 did the trick.

If you have taken the time to implement translations in your SSAS cube, it is comforting to know that the Analytic Grid can and will display your localized text.

From what I can gather, we aren’t quite smart enough to simply read regional settings on the client (as defined in Control Panel | Regional Settings) and run with them like we can when leveraging Excel 2007. Instead, you must set the language in question in Internet Explorer ala:

Tools | Internet Options | Languages (button)

You’ll need to add the language you want the grid localized in to the “language list”, and then move it to the top of the list. Clear your browser cache, and you should be ready to rock and roll.