Peter Eb.

Gemini has an official name: PowerPivot

2009-10-20T10:00:00Z

Well the Gemini team is making progress towards shipping. Now they have a real name: PowerPivot . They still don’t have any pricing/licensing/packaging details; that is promised later this year. There’s also links to sign up for a beta. But I don’t have any more details about that. Like all Microsoft employees I had access to a survey about the name a few months ago. I don’t remember anymore what kinds of choices I had, I remember not being very excited about them. But I do remember that it was clear...(read more)

PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP3 released

2009-10-16T17:30:00Z

Finally made it out the door ! For the AddIn I have a couple notes: Besides the usual rollup of hotfixes (bug fixes) there is a new feature: Line Item Details (LIDs). This was supported by the server but not on the client side, and now it is! We did our best to get some data entry accelerators for LIDs based on feedback from those customers who needed LIDs. For performance of the AddIn not too much changed, although on scenarios involving large submissions (10s of thousands of cells in the change...(read more)

Excel 2010 is better than the PPS Planning AddIn

2009-10-15T09:00:00Z

Although the model of using an Excel AddIn can be a little clunky (especially for what PPS Planning called the contributor scenario) I think my team did a pretty good job getting some very usable reporting elements. Now I get to point you to things my team didn’t do, but are native features of Excel. So you get better a better user experience (UX) overall and all these features are programmatically accessible. Asymmetric CrossJoins I think PPS Planning’s Excel AddIn handled these in a very easy to...(read more)

Gemini destroys the world….Not!

2009-08-29T21:43:15Z

So in a previous post I tried to tear down Gemini to something relatively simple, instead of curing cancer. This post is when I build it back up. Gemini just lets end-users combine data without having to get IT and DBAs involved. This is precisely where some fear begins to be revealed by IT and DBAs and practitioner partners. It’s twofold because some fear for their jobs and others fear for their sanity. ( Disclaimer: I’m not on the Gemini team, I’m just talking about my interpretation of all the...(read more)

Gemini Cures Cancer…Not!

2009-08-26T18:28:49Z

Most of the people reading this blog have probably also seen demos or at least heard of Gemini and it’s magical powers of solving all BI problems known and unknown. (And you probably want to be looking at it. You can see if you get accepted to the CTP from the instructions here . I understand that you’ll automatically get the preview of Office 2010 if you’re accepted…) From my perspective of implementing the PerformancePoint Planning Excel AddIn, I can say Gemini would have been a huge help. The...(read more)

Radio Silence

2009-07-17T18:00:00Z

Well radio silence has been maintained quite successfully. Sorry for the lack of updates but with Planning development ended I haven't had a lot to say… Office 2010 (aka Office 14) is finally starting to see the light of day. I know some of you by now have gotten your hands on the Technical Preview and are checking things out. Others probably have watched some of the video recordings that have come out recently. My team has been mainly working on the Monitoring and Analytics components in SharePoint...(read more)

Microsoft BI Conference 2008

2008-09-29T23:00:29Z

I imagine that very few people who read this blog don't already know about the Microsoft BI Conference happening in Seattle this year during October 6-8. I'll be spending as much time as I can there (since I'm local its easy for me to go but I've still got to keep track of normal things happening at work). I'm still trying to decide what sessions to go to. As a developer I don't get as much customer interaction as the PM side (or sales & support), so I'm leaning towards trying to attend as many...(read more)

Extended absences and other people doing my job for me!

2008-09-27T12:00:07Z

Its been quite a while since I've posted. I've still been hanging out in the PPS TechNet forums, but just haven't been finding as much time to post. I've had a little change in job duties that are taking some time to adjust to. Anyway I'm very pleased to see that others in the blogosphere are doing a good job disseminating information about PerformancePoint. I just want to highlight one post in particular because it is exactly one of the topics I wanted to cover: Sacha Tomey's excellent write up...(read more)

SP1

2008-06-05T05:22:17Z

If you haven’t seen it yet the english builds are available! http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3444589&SiteID=17 I have some details about the addin performance improvements http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3445168&SiteID=17 ....(read more)

When will data appear in the cube after a submit from the PPS Planning Business Client?

2008-05-14T18:00:00Z

It's actually hard to say. This process is asynchronous which is why the status is initially Pending, then WaitProcess, then finally Partial/Submitted. See my other posts about assignment statuses and assignment actions for more details and a quick overview. Ok so we understand this, but just when-oh-when will data appear in the cube for others to see after I click submit? Well, really, it depends. Otherwise, you wouldn't need this post. There are actually a couple of asynchronous processes that...(read more)

HOWTO: Dynamic rows or columns with a dimension property filter

2008-05-12T18:00:00Z

To filter rows and columns by a filter selection has previously been discussed here . But one thing you might not have noticed is that the list of property values (aka the filter scope) is static. If a new member property appears the form needs to be modified to include it, even if the “all” button. This is different than a normal filter, where the UI allows a dynamic filter scope by a number of expressions. Luckily in the RDL both kinds of filters are stored in the same fashion. The only thing that...(read more)

HOWTO: Filter rows and columns by selecting from a filter

2008-05-09T18:00:00Z

(Sorry for the gap since my last post, things have been a bit busy lately in Peter Eb. land…) One simple way to do this filtering is to enable suppress blank rows or suppress blank columns. Then when there is no data (non-null) in the cube for those rows/columns they won’t be shown. This is basically turning on NON EMPTY for an axis. Its useful in a lot of scenarios, but is also very heavy handed. You don’t get any all null rows or columns which may not work well for scenarios where data isn’t seeded....(read more)

What does this PPS Planning workflow action mean?

2008-04-28T14:00:00Z

Workflow handles jobs, cycles, assignments and more. In keeping with my focus on the PPS Planning Business Client (aka Add-In for Excel), this post will just cover those actions related to assignments. In keeping with my new analogy of describing workflow as the paper/check-based banking system I'll try to use some comparisons as well, although the analogy doesn't hold as well when we get to this level of detail. I'll also refer you to my previous post that described what the various assignment statuses...(read more)

HOWTO: Select a time range that is dynamic (updates over time for a rolling forecast)

2008-04-25T17:00:00Z

There are 2 kinds of ranges that the PPS Planning Member Picker supports: 1) From the selected member to an offset from current period (or vice versa). 2) Or from an offset from the current period to another offset from the current period. (It's also possible to simply use an offset from the current period without a range specified). When using the member picker with Time look for the special dropdown that appears - hopefully this isn't surprising - called...."Time"!...(read more)

HOWTO: Hide filters for dimensions that confuse users

2008-04-24T18:00:00Z

For data entry forms (and even some reports) its pretty important to keep contributors focused on their specific task. Its especially easy for users who are not familiar with OLAP or PPS to be confused by some things: "TimeDataView" and "Business Process" are two dimensions in particular that are just not relevant to expose to contributors most of the time. To create a data-entry form with a writable region, however, its necessary to use each dimension in your matrix, so let’s see what we can do...(read more)