Philo's WebLog : Business Intelligence

About the changes in PerformancePoint

philoj — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:44:00 GMT

If you haven't heard, Microsoft has made changes to the PerformancePoint product alignment. Basically this means PPS no longer exists as a separate product - the dashboard and analytic (M/A) components are being folded into MOSS, while Planning is being "end of life"d. Effective (almost) immediately, if you own rights to PerformancePoint, you now get rights to MOSS Enterprise (InfoPath web forms, Excel Services); if you own rights to SharePoint Enterprise, you now get rights to PerformancePoint.

Really, this is just a good thing for everyone, since MOSS, Excel Services, and PPS were always really siblings under the covers - there are a lot of synergies that you can now leverage very nicely.

In addition, InfoPath web forms provide a great way of ad-hoc data entry for a BI solution (there's always at least *one* chunk of data that's the result of someone typing values into Enterprise Manager...)

"But Philo, you just wrote a book on PerformancePoint!" Yes, and since it also covers SQL Server as a BI platform, and MOSS, and Excel Services, it's still a *great* book for Microsoft BI: Pro PerformancePoint Server 2007. (Amazon.com)

Pro PerformancePoint about to hit the shelves!

philoj — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:16:00 GMT

Well, it took the better part of a year, but my second book, Pro PerformancePoint Server 2007: Building Business Intelligence Solutions (Pro) (APress) should be rolling off the presses as you read this. It's almost 500 pages, and I tried to cover Microsoft's entire business intelligence "stack" - from SQL Server (Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services) to SharePoint BI, ProClarity, Excel Services, and PerformancePoint (scorecards, dashboards, analytics, and planning). I've even got a short chapter on the new Management Reporter for financial reporting.

Not a hugely deep dive on any of the technologies, but hopefully enough to wrap your brain about where everything fits and get your feet wet with exercises building things.

I'd be interested in hearing feedback about the book.

Dimension Security in SQL Server Analysis Services

philoj — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:18:00 GMT

I know, the mind boggles - a developer writing about security...

While I was doing the research for this, I was startled by the number of articles on this topic that immediately talk about using MDX queries for dimension security. While MDX queries offer powerful fine-tuning capabilities for restricting access to data in Analysis Services, your first stop should be user roles coupled with Active Directory security groups and Dimension Data filters. Very straightforward and an easy starting point for locking down your cube.

Here's a screencast walkthrough I did just to show how powerful a concept this is: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=350411

Scorecards - SharePoint, SQL Server, or PerformancePoint?

philoj — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 08:42:00 GMT

A few years ago, if you asked Microsoft how to build a scorecard, they may have shrugged. Then we released the "Business Scorecard Accelerator" - a free technology mainly designed to showcase SQL Server Analysis Services.

It was so popular that Microsoft made a product out of it - Business Scorecard Manager 2005. While BSM could pull data from ODBC data sources, its best buddy was still Analysis Services. With the right cube, you could throw together a scorecard in under a day. Of course, BSM still had its quirks...

After Microsoft bought ProClarity in 2006, the BI vision coalesced - BSM v2, ProClarity, and Biz# (a multidimensional planning application) were unified into PerformancePoint. PerformancePoint, which just launched a few weeks ago, is a huge step forward in business intelligence, but more on that another time.

At the same time, SharePoint 2007 has "KPI lists" - a special type of document list which can display collections of key performance indicators. This can be distracting as a type of "scorecard." SharePoint also adds Excel Services, which can allow users to build scorecards in Excel and display them inside SharePoint.

So what to use when?

A quick overview...

MOSS KPI Lists:

Pros:

Easy to use
Integrated with MOSS (web parts & lists)
Can show multiple data sources
Can show KPI's from SQL Server Analysis Services

Cons:

Does not scale across the organization
Limited functionality

Basically, MOSS KPI lists are a good way to pull KPI functionality on to a SharePoint page - surface some business intelligence on a portal page or shared site. They make a good companion to a BI effort, but this is not the way to start a BI or scorecard initiative - you will quickly be frustrated by some of the limited functionality (formatting, lack of drill down, etc).

Business Scorecard Manager 2005:

Pros:

Strategic
Scalable
Linked Analytic Charts
Annotations
Alerts

Cons:

Need SQL Server 2000 Notification Services for alerts
Builder is quirky
Working with ODBC data sources is labor intensive

The greatest thing about BSM is how very easy it is to set up a manual scorecard and publish it into SharePoint. Once you learn your way around the Builder, you can whip up a manual scorecard in a few hours. This is powerful because in a scorecard initiative putting an ad-hoc scorecard on the web can "wake up" stakeholders and get their attention while you start wiring it to back end sources.

Having said that, wiring BSM to those back end sources can be labor intensive - each current value, target, and trend has to be wired up as an independent query. Again, using SQL Server Analysis Services can make this far easier - dimensions automatically display across the scorecard.

Excel Services Scorecard

Pros:

Easy to use
Ad-hoc

Cons:

No drill down
May not scale
No linked charts

Creating a scorecard in Excel and publishing it to Excel Services is a nice way to publish an ad-hoc scorecard. However, it lacks the linked ad-hoc charting and drill down capabilities. It also may be difficult to maintain due to its nature as an Excel spreadsheet. (This is not meant as a limitation of Excel, but rather how Excel xls files often invite sloppy processes...)

ProClarity Dashboard Server:

(ProClarity had a Dashboard Server product, which is being discontinued)

PerformancePoint Monitoring:

Pros:

Designed for the enterprise
Annotations
Linked analytic reports
Drill-down
Dashboard builder
Extensible

Cons:

A more expensive option
No alerts

Honestly, PerformancePoint Dashboard & Scorecard builder is awesome to work with. The designer is drag and drop and pretty intuitive. It still works best with multidimensional data, but can also show data from other data sources (SharePoint lists, Excel spreadsheets, ODBC data sources, etc). In addition PerformancePoint includes powerful analytics from ProClarity, and the new planning engine for what-if and forecast modeling.

So - SharePoint KPI lists and Excel Services are good introductions into scorecarding, but for a real scorecard/dashboard/BI initiative, PerformancePoint is the way to go.

For more information: http://www.microsoft.com/bi

SQL Server Analysis Services in ten minutes

philoj — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:29:00 GMT

Analysis Services has been part of SQL Server for a while, but it's underappreciated by most. I've posted another video on Channel 9 to try to share what a powerful capability this is for understanding large volumes of aggregated data.

More than just the simple demo (showing a cube, clicking through some dimensions, pulling the data into Excel 2007), Analysis Services opens the door to truly powerful analytic capabilities in data mining, visualization, and (with PerformancePoint Server), scorecards, dashboards, analytic charts, and planning scenarios.

I'm not trying to trivialize the technology - OLAP cubes are definitely something that's a short time to learn, a lifetime to master. But I am trying to demystify some of this stuff so SQL Server devs & DBA's can get an idea where to start.

Short video, but I'm trying to keep them under ten minutes.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=343717