ProClarity users tend to miss the ability to create calculated measures when they first start experimenting with Excel-as-ProClarity-replacement. Fear no more!

Tyler Chessman, another Microsoft Technical Specialist has created an add-in to allow you to do just that in 2007.  It’s called PTPower, and you can check it out here!

I’m not a big fan of this guy, but a recent guest post was a great read. The author, Eric Ries essentially argues that if metrics you’re tracking aren’t actionable, they’re “vanity metrics” and not that useful:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/05/19/vanity-metrics-vs-actionable-metrics/

When you hear companies doing PR about the billions of messages sent using their product, or the total GDP of their economy, think vanity metrics. But there are examples closer to home. Consider the most basic of all reports: the total number of “hits” to your website. Let’s say you have 10,000. Now what? Do you really know what actions you took in the past that drove those visitors to you, and do you really know which actions to take next? In most cases, I don’t think it’s very helpful.

Eric focuses on online / web analytics  scenarios, but it’s easy to make the mental jump to more everyday BI applications and metrics like sales / calls handled / whatever. You should give this article a read.

Most people have discovered by now that in order to use Windows 2008 as a “client” in BI demonstrations that you need to install the “Desktop Experience” feature of the OS. Without it, you’ll have problems getting into SharePoint from Office.

During a recent POC,  I was working with an “all 2008 image” (SQL 2008/Windows 2008/MOSS SP1/PPS SP1/Office 2007), and had a bear of a time getting Excel to browse MOSS libraries. Desktop Experience was installed, but when I attempted to browse to a MOSS library in Excel, the Web Query dialog would pop instead:

If I just plugged the URL of a report or document library into the Open: dialog, Excel was actually importing the page as HTML!

Office 2007 leverages WebDav in order to open MOSS libraries as folders, so I figured that was the problem - I found I was unable to Map a Network Drive to any of the MOSS libraries so I knew I was on the right track.

After several un-install / re-installs of the Desktop Experience component with no change in behavior,  I went ahead and  installed the IIS 7.0 WebDav Extension: It adds some additional configuration UI to InetMgr, and I thought having access to those extra knobs and dials might solve my problem. No joy.

Long story short, I took off my geek hat, put on my consumer hat and got the help of Rakki from PSS. After noticing that I had the IIS 7.0 WebDav Extension installed, he mentioned that MOSS uses its own implementation of WebDav and we didn’t need the extension. He suggested we remove it. I frankly didn’t think it would make a difference since I had the problem before I had installed it and putting the component on the box was an attempt to solve the issue to begin with, but whatever.

So, we un-installed it, and lo and behold, I was able to map drives to my MOSS libraries and Excel / Office was able to browse them. Why? We’re not sure - perhaps the un-install of IIS WebDav did something to nudge the “broken” MOSS WebDav implementation back to life. Complete speculation on my part.

But, if you run into the same issue, maybe this will save you some time (or maybe not, who knows).

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 pages, Internet Explorer 7 generally pegged my CPU at 97%, and it was taking at least a minute for the page to render. Often, more than half of the report objects failed to render at all (”an unexpected error occured”).

I’m working in a single integrated environment (IE/SQL/SSRS/SSAS/PPS/MOSS all on one box), and I could tell that IE hogging up CPU wasn’t even allowing SSAS, SSRS, PPS and MOSS to do their work. While IE was sitting @ 97%, msmdsrv.exe or reportingservicesservice.exe might hit 2% CPU for a moment then drop back down to %0 when they usually used more CPU cycles.

Clueless and confused, I appealed to those smarter than I for help. Josh Unger, a PPS SDET at Microsoft suggested I try IE 8 on the image. I dutifully installed it, and whammo, problem solved.  My slowly running dashboards now rendered in no more than 15 seconds (and these were pages which included PAS and SSRS reports - the analytic charts returned within moments when they had been the problem children earlier).

I circled back and asked Josh exactly why life was so good in IE8, and he explained that IE 7 ( adhering to standards) only allows two concurrent connections, and therefore 2 AJAX requests made to the server at the same time. Perhaps that didn’t do a lot of good when I had 4, 6, 8, or more  AJAX controls on a page all wanting to do stuff? In IE 8, we can have up to 6 connections. 

I guess in my case getting more reports “working” on the server at the same time allowed them to begin returning more quickly. And once a report had returned, I suspect that the particular AJAX-based control that hosted it didn’t need any/as much CPU vs. having it sit there waiting for a connection to become available.

Thanks to Josh and thanks to IE8!

If you’ve been waiting for the Click Once version of Report Builder 2.0, your wait is over (as long as you don’t mind using non-RTM bits).

The SP1 CTP will allow you to launch RB 1.0 or 2.0 as Click Once applications in both Native and MOSS integrated mode.

Have at it!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6f26fc45-f0ca-49cf-a6ee-840c7e8bb8af&displaylang=en

Oh, and how to do you turn it on? In native mode, go to Site Settings,  then set Custom Report Builder launch URL to /ReportBuilder/ReportBuilder_2_0_0_0.application. MOSS integrated mode has a similar property which can be found in the Set Server Defaults link of the Reporting Services section of the Application Management inside the SPS Central Administration console.

Carl Rabeler of the Microsoft SQLCat team has just released a really nice set of tools targeted at helping you analyze SSAS performance.

You can read about it here:

http://sqlcat.com/toolbox/archive/2009/02/05/a-solution-for-collecting-analysis-services-performance-data-from-many-sources-for-performance-analysis.aspx

Then download it from codeplex, here:

 http://www.codeplex.com/SQLSrvAnalysisSrvcs

For the past several months, Project Real got lost out on microsoft.com - those who wanted the whitepapers and/or samples were pretty much on their own.

The materials have been restored and are now available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/bi/ProjectREAL

In the “news to me” department, we’ll also see a 2008 version of Project Real at some point in the future - and no, I have NO idea when that will be

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 what do I think? I think it’s a smart move.

Why?

It’s easy for customers

By consolidating M & A into MOSS, we give customers the ability to create impressive, powerful scorecards and dashboards without the purchase of additional “stuff”.  Sure, if you’re running MOSS Standard, you’ll need to have an Enterprise CAL, but we’re not talking about a wholesale introduction of new products into your infrastructure.  The ability to install PPS as a MOSS shared service (in MOSS14) vs. running yet another setup.exe is good thing – BI is just “in the box” – it is part of your core infrastructure!

It’s good for most customers

Customers I talk to want to deploy scorecards, dashboards, and analytics broadly. I’d guess that < 20% of the people I work with want to do Planning, and are only doing so for a small number of users.  While dashboards are pretty darn easy to create and deploy, planning takes quite a bit more work. You generally need hire to consultants to help you create a solution which will only service a relatively small population of your users.

With a limited amount of development time on our hands, I think it makes sense to focus on scenarios that affect the largest number of customers. Microsoft is all about “BI for the masses”, not “BI for the 15 business analysts”.  We can now focus on what we do best – creating good, inexpensive software for everyone.

Moving forward, competitors will clearly attack our offering for having no ready-bake planning solution, and they’ll be on target with their criticism. I bet analysts like Gartner will ding us, too. But, so what?  The planning audience is not what we’re about, and in this economy, who wants to pay for features they don’t need?

It makes our BI story easier to understand

OK, I admit it – we have some feature overlap across our products. ?   Every vendor does.  Before this change, when a customer thought “KPI”, he could do it in Excel/Excel Services, MOSS, Reporting Services, PerformancePoint, and soon, Gemini.  That’s quite a selection of hammers!

With PPS Services inside MOSS, we’re simplifying things – you use MOSS to do this work. Using Excel, SSRS, etc. clearly become edge-case solutions because the MOSS offering is so strong by comparison.

If I need to do an “elevator” pitch on Microsoft BI, I now can say, “Microsoft BI is SQL Server, Office and SharePoint. Fat client data visualization is inside Excel, thin client data visualization is inside SharePoint.”

Done.  End of story.

I’m greedy

I’m an MSFT shareholder and employee. By making MOSS even more attractive, I think the net gain in revenue we’ll realize as a result people adopting it and/or upgrading to the MOSS enterprise CAL  (don’t forget additional indirect SQL Server and Windows Server sales) will be far greater than the bucks we see  from a stand-alone PPS product. That’s money in my pocket.

I don’t know what my mental block around Excel Services is all about - but configuring it just kills me.
After building more Hyper-V and VS images which include Excel Services than I care to count, I still have not managed to get data refresh working right the first time. Ever!

Kind souls often offer tidbits like “did you configure the trusted file location” and other nice-but-useless advice for anyone who has worked with the technology for a little while, and I just grind my teeth. Do I sound bitter? Well, I am. I get particularly aggravated that the error message doesn’t give me more information to go on, too.

Today, while building a new Business Intelligence demo image which relies completely on Windows 2008 & SQL Server 2008, I again ran into data refresh hell. But I also happened to stumble upon a great tool which helped solve my issues after only dropping 2-3 F-bombs.

For the MOSS gurus in the house, this is probably old stuff, but it was an epiphany for me.

The Log View feature integrates an easy way to your MOSS logs right into SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

You can download it from here:

http://www.codeplex.com/features/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2502

Once you’ve grabbed it, drop it in the folder below on your MOSS box:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

Then, navigate to the same location on a command prompt and execute the following:

stsadm -o addsolution -filename LogViewer.wsp
stsadm -o deploysolution -name LogViewer.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate
stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs
iisreset

That’s it. Jump to the Operations page of Central Admin, and you’ll see View Unified Logging Service under Utilities. Hit it.

Select a log file which covers the period you had a problem with data refresh, choose Excel Services in the This category filter, select Warning in Event Severity and click Go.

I found this:

Unable to establish connection using only the connection string. If a username and password are saved in the connection string, they may not be correct, or the Unattended Service Account may not be configured. [Session: 21.1wTVe6u1xgnzlBvXz6VtM90.5.en-US5.en-US73.+0300#0000-11-00-01T02:00:00:0000#+0000#0000-03-00-02T02:00:00:0000#-0060 User: ATLAS\Administrator

Whoops! Forgot to configure the Excel Services Unattended Execution Account. I knocked it out, bounced IIS, but still had a problem. So I went back to the log, filtered on Information in Event Severity, and found this:

The workbook 'http://atlasone/Reports/FirstTest.xlsx' attempted to access external data using the unsupported provider 'Provider=MSOLAP.4;Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=True;Data Source=.;Initial Catalog=Adventure Works DW 2008'. [Session: 21.37RxBqgtK2fX8GRWS68rV90.5.en-US5.en-US73.+0300#0000-11-00-01T02:00:00:0000#+0000#0000-03-00-02T02:00:00:0000#-0060 User: ATLAS\Administrator]

Jeepers! The connection in my Excel worksheet was made with the latest/greatest SSAS provider, which didn’t even exist when MOSS was dropped - So I added MSOLAP.4 to the list of Trusted data providers (under Excel Services Settings in Shared Services), did another IISReset, and I was in business.

Can’t tell you how much time this little tool gave me back.

Thanks to some of the fine product managers at Microsoft, the All Up Release 7.1 is now available for public download. It is made up of 7 RAR files, each about 700 MB:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

This is really good stuff. Enjoy!