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.
The landing page for PerformancePoint SP2 just appeared at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX102380591033.aspx. While as of yet there are no download links on the page, I think it’s safe to guess that we’ll see the distro in the next day or so.
Happy patching!
SQL Server 2008 Cumulative Update 1 was released a few weeks ago, and contains a very nice (but not promoted) improvement around PDF rendering.
For those who regularly render reports which require specific fonts and character sets (for example, trying to render a “simple Chinese” language report to PDF), you need to have the font in question installed on client where you read the exported PDF or you see garbage. Our PDF rendering extension didn’t include “font embedding” in 2000/2005/2008 RTM, which something that the Acrobat format does support.
Well, in CU1, we added font embedding to the PDF extension – multilingual reports just got a little bit easier!
Late last week I stumbled into a really informative conversation around how 2005 reports are “automagically” upgraded to 2008. Thought I’d post the broad strokes here in FAQ format for everyone’s use. Thanks to Robert Bruckner who contributed most of the information!
Q: If I upgrade my instance of SSRS 2005 to 2008, what happens to the reports in reportserver database? Do they get automatically upgraded?
A: Reports in the catalog are automatically upgraded from 2005 to 2008 when they are first run on the newly upgraded machine. Each report is upgraded only once, not each time it is run.
Q: If my report gets automatically upgraded to the 2008 schema, can I get my original 2005 report back somehow?
A: Yes, you can. The upgrade process does not actually delete the original 2005 report, but simply makes a copy of it and stores the compiled result. If you “Edit” the report using Report Manager (to download a copy of the RDL) or call GetReportDefinition(), the original 2005 report definition will be returned.
Q: What if the report doesn’t get upgraded for some reason – will it still run on 2008?
A: SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 has the ability to render reports using the new “on demand” engine, and the older 2005 engine.
Q: So, if my 2005 report gets automatically upgraded to the 2008 RDL schema, is there any way I can get the upgraded version (2008) out of the server for use elsewhere?
A: No. You’ll need to use BIDS or Report Builder (v2) to upgrade your 2005 report to the 2008 schema.
Q: I know that every once in a while, a 2005 report won’t auto-upgrade to 2008 successfully. How can I tell if a report I’m running is being rendered in 2005 or 2008 mode?
A: We attempt to upgrade a 2005 report to 2008 once and only once. If the process fails the first time, we don’t try again. To see which engine is being used to render a report, use the new ExecutionLog2 view in the reportserver database, examine the AdditionalInfo column and check the <ProcessingEngine> element. A value of 2 indicates the new 2008 “on demand” rendering engine was used, while a value of 1 means the older, 2005 engine was used.
Yesterday, the fine folks at Microsoft added an evaluation version of PAS 6.3 to the already available ProClarity Desktop 6.3 eval. You can download it here.
A few notes about this release:
· ProClarity Analytics Server 6.3 – Evaluation contains the RTM version of the product; it does not include any of the ProClarity 6.3 hotfixes or cumulative updates.
· You cannot upgrade this evaluation version with any PAS hotfixes or cumulative updates.
· Support for this product (via the ProClarity TechNet forum only – http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1870&SiteID=17.) will only be available if no PAS updates have been applied.
· This product contains only the server components of ProClarity Analytics Server 6.3—that is, the PAS Administration Tool and the thin client, ProClarity Web Standard. It does not include ProClarity Dashboard Server 6.3 or the following ProClarity 6.3 add-ins: ProClarity Web Professional, ProClarity KPI Designer, or ProClarity Selector.
· To publish briefing books to PAS, you are expected to use the evaluation version of ProClarity Desktop Professional 6.3.
With the RTM of SQL 2008, it looks like a slightly older version of the add-in has been removed from microsoft.com. Unfortunately, all of the search engines (including Live) are pointing at the old, dead page.
If you search for the add-in directly from Microsoft.com, you’ll find it here:
