Philo's WebLog : Non-Tech

A simple conceit vs. questions left unasked

philoj — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:38:00 GMT

Here's a fun mental exercise - on the one hand, we have the "everyone is lost but me" syndrome, where someone will charge off on a course of action, despite many many warnings about the perilous nature of his quest, until he runs smack dab into that windmill.

And yet we have "there is no such thing as a stupid question" - where even though everyone around you seems to know what's going on, and you see some flaw, the refrain is "it never hurts to ask the question."

How do we reconcile these? One the one hand, we say that charging off contrary to everyone's opinion is bad; but on the other hand questioning the course when everyone is charging off is good.

The issue is ego.

"Everyone is lost but me" isn't about one person heading in a direction that everyone else warns about; it's about believing that you are smarter than everyone else around you. I can cite two examples and a counter-example from, of all places, Hollywood:

Batman&Robin, where Joel Schumacher killed a multi-billion dollar franchise because he was sure what the public wanted to see was more camp like the Batman TV show of the 60's. Never mind that Tim Burton's dark, adult dramas had raked in sinful amounts of cash - when everything is working right, obviously it's time to change the formula. The box office punished Schumacher and comic book movies went into remission for ten years, until Spiderman and Raimi's understanding of the public brought it back.
Annapolis (and the thought that prompted this post). This one is near and dear to my heart, since I'm a Naval Academy graduate. As I understand it, the director/producer people wanted to make a movie set at the Naval Academy - hoping to trade a bit on the patriotism borne by 9/11 and launch a new era of Top Gun movies. They approached the Navy about filming at USNA. The public affairs officers in the Navy read the script, and asked for a few changes. The producer/director people refused, and the Navy refused permission (so the movie was shot in Philadelphia). This turn of events was crushing to a lot of USNA graduates, and at first we blamed the Navy for being so unbending. Now that I have seen part of the film, I understand. One of the objections the Navy had was about a romance between a Plebe (freshman) and a female upperclassman. This is fraternization and an expulsion offense at the Naval Academy. I'm sure the producer/director people thought this made it a "forbidden love," but it just came away as completely and utterly unbelievable. I had to turn the movie off. So because the producer/director people thought they knew better than Navy officials what a USNA movie should look like, it tanked.
The exception: The Lord of the Rings. When Peter Jackson first landed the role as director, he talked about "his vision" of Tolkien's work. Several hundred thousand angry emails and letters from fans later, he took their rebukes as a challenge and decided to go the other way - be as accurate as humanly possible to the original work. The rest of that, is history.

Of course, there's an exception to all of this - there are times that you may be so sure in your vision that you decide to ride off despite the warnings of others. Many visionaries have changed the world this way. Sometimes it's still ego, but I think a large number of times what sets them apart isn't thinking "everyone else is lost but me" but rather "everyone else is looking for the path, but I think I can find a shortcut" - not doubting the intelligence of everyone else, but believing they've found insight into a new path.

A fine line to walk, to be sure.

And yet you'll sit in a room of people you know are smarter than you who are discussing a plan and settling onto the details when you're sure you've spotted a flaw in their plan. Is it ego to ask about it? Well, it may be ego to assert that you have found the flaw in their plan and their all stupid; but I think again - many folks who ask (or sadly, don't ask) that question aren't sure they're smarter than everyone else - often they just think they are the ones who have missed something.

Who was it that said "don't let your ego write checks your body can't cash..."?

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

InfoPath & SharePoint screencast demo

philoj — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:01:00 GMT

As follow-up to the "hook InfoPath to a database" demo, here I'm taking a step back to a simpler form - building an InfoPath form to be used on its own in conjunction with SharePoint.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=344635

In the next few videos I'm going to cover:

InfoPath, xml schemas, and xml
An advanced InfoPath form connected to a database
Connecting an InfoPath form to a .Net web service
Connecting an InfoPath form to a SQL Server web service
eForms & workflow in SharePoint

(Just a reminder - this and other fun InfoPath 2007 stuff all covered in my book...)

I'll also be covering more business intelligence content (SQL Server Analysis Services, ProClarity, PerformancePoint - stay tuned!)

Bibliomeme

philoj — Sun, 18 Apr 2004 04:25:00 GMT

1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“Right-click the My Documents folder and select Properties”

(from Hillier's book, reviewed below)

Hmm... that may be the most common answer around. ;-)

Philo

SharePoint Planning

philoj — Sat, 10 Apr 2004 03:36:00 GMT

      The centipede was happy, quite,
         Until the toad for fun
      Said, 'Pray which leg comes after which?'
      This worked her mind to such a pitch
      She lay distracted in a ditch,
         Considering how to run.

-George Herbert Palmer

It's entirely possible SharePoint offers the best out-of-the-box experience of any product Microsoft has ever released. It's just Next-Next-Next-Next-Finish and you have a Portal to turn your webmasters loose on.

SharePoint offers a lot of power. So much power that it can often be in danger of not getting used at all. There's a hierarchy to SPS Portals, Sites, Pages, etc. There are area pages to aggregate information, groups, audiences, topics, “Best Bets,” and so on. There is so much to do, that an organization can spend all its time “planning” how to deploy a portal and never get around to actually doing it.

There is a story about a college, perhaps apocryphal (Larry Wall seems to think it's UC Irvine)

The college was building a large addition consisting of several buildings and a large quad area. After the buildings were completed, one of the Regents visited. He asked why there were no sidewalks between the buildings?

The college president replied that the architect had a good plan - open the buildings without sidewalks, let the students walk over the grass. Over time, trails will develop along the most common paths.

Then come back in a year and pave the trails.

Treat SharePoint the same way - lay out a basic hierarchy, some basic structure and templates, then simply let people start using it. Let them add sites, pages, content, lists, and so on. Let it build, let it grow. After a period of time, start reviewing the SharePoint reports and logs - then the areas, groups, and other aggregations you need should be apparent. If you need additional structure in the Portal, you can add it. Train the topic assistant and see what it turns up. Review help desk pain points and address those in the portal structure.

But all this time your users have been doing what SharePoint was designed to do - collaborate.

Philo

SharePoint Administrator's Guide

SharePoint Accelerator for Intranets (good background info on SPS)

Why Smart Clients?

philoj — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 22:23:00 GMT

... or “Why is my client so fat?”

InfoPath is really cool. To some degree, it actually delivers on the ancient promise of “productivity without programmers.” Fundamentally, it's a form design and publication tool - end users can design forms and publish them to a server where the people who need to fill out the form can access it, fill in the data, and submit the data to a predefined data store.

When combined with SharePoint, there is generally no reason a developer needs to be involved at all - users can lay out forms, create lookups, create *cascading* lookups, add validation, and so on. If the data is simply to be aggregated in a SharePoint forms library, the whole thing is automagical and can be queried directly at the end.

I think it's a wonderful thing for developers because personally I find building generic forms for standard business data collection somewhat, uh, tedious. I'd much rather be solving larger business problems and inventing the next bread slicer.

“But Philo,” you ask, “what does this have to do with fat, er, smart clients?”

Simple - the #1 question regarding InfoPath is “does everyone need InfoPath on the desktop to use an InfoPath form?”

The answer is “it depends.”

Since InfoPath is all XML based (the form definitions are saved in a cab file, but fundamentally they're an XML Schema; the form data is an XML document with a pointer to the XSD), then no - you could easily write an ASP.Net page or a Windows forms client that uses the form XSD to generate the form data in a properly-formatted XML document. But that's not really what the questioner is asking - they want to know “can people without InfoPath on their desktop use the InfoPath forms with no additional coding?”

Think about it - boil that question down and it's “can we get all the InfoPath functionality without InfoPath?” To which the polite answer is “no.”

Why not?

Anyone who's done web development has faced this question: “Can we have spell checking in this data entry form?” Often this happens on a contract where one delivery requirement is for complete client-side validation. Well, in essence this means that every time someone downloads the form, they need to download a dictionary as well. Rich text formatting, validation, spell-checking - these are all requirements we've faced, and we've either bought tools or coded them ourselves.

This means:

Additional development cost
Additional testing cost
For web-based clients, additional download sizes (often massive ones)

InfoPath offers a rich platform for end users to create forms on that provides the full power of the Word libraries (spell checking, grammar checking, rich formatting), a solid client-side validation model, .Net-based code behind (in SP1, download the preview), and offline capability. That's right - a web-aware solution that works in an offline mode, no additional code on your part necessary.

[One caveat in here is where the data goes. As I mentioned above, if the data is going into SharePoint, the end user can build the whole thing. If it needs to go into a business system, the IT Department may have to get involved to provide the data consumer. InfoPath consumes web services very nicely, in keeping with a service-oriented architecture.]

Web-based solutions definitely have a place, and the open architecture of InfoPath forms even allows web-enabling data entry and/or display of the form itself. But when you're talking about robust data entry requirements, web-based solutions generally run out of steam quickly. The client wants a form with spell-checking, client-side validation, offline capability, etc, etc, etc. You can build it, but it's going to be pricy, and it only solves one problem.

InfoPath gives developers the ability to let clients create their own forms with little or no developer intervention, and allows developers to move on to solving bigger and better problems. So you have to ask yourself how you'd rather spend your day: “Hey John, can you move these three fields five pixels to the right?” or “We need someone to build a proof of concept for the new smart phone client the Operations Department needs” ?

Learn more about how developers can add value to InfoPath solutions with the InfoPath Developer Resources Kit

Philo