PerformancePointy: Wade Dorrell's MSDN Blog : performancepoint

Thanks for a great SharePoint Conference!

Wade Dorrell — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:25:32 GMT

Thanks for attending SharePoint Conference 2009 & talking with us about your scenarios, troubles, what you’d like to see us turn the ratchet on, and what you love. I talked with a slice of you about PerformancePoint Services, but also the whole insights ecosystem for SharePoint 2010… Excel Services, Reporting Services, Visio Services, and more.

Above: Packed house at our “Creating dashboard as easy as 1, 2, 3” PerformancePoint Services session. Sorry about the room acoustics… we got a late room upgrade… you can get the video recording here sometime next week.

I love conferences because they get me so fired up. Jason said I took on the attributes of a certain CEO for a few moments when talking about PowerPivot. Yeah, I think I might have. What fires me up is that you love it, you came to a conference to fill your brain with it, and we’re putting the bits in your hands soon (November.) I think that’s worth a dance or two.

Want to know more about features of PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010? Keep your eyes on the PerformancePoint Services product team blog for a series of posts about each feature.

Dashboard Deployment Without Folders

Wade Dorrell — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 03:39:41 GMT

When deploying a dashboard to a document library from PerformancePoint 2007 Dashboard Designer, Dashboard Designer creates each dashboard page .aspx file in a folder named the same as the dashboard:

But what if we don’t want folders?

The “Create View” Way

I created a view for “Insurance Dashboards” with the “Show all items without folders” setting turned on, and set it as the default:

The folders still exist, but users visiting the document library get a flattened list of all pages by default.

The “SharePoint Workflow” Way

With SharePoint workflow we can remove folders as dashboards are deployed.

First, I create a document library for the purpose of deployment. I called it “Insurance Dashboards - Deploy”.

Next, I create a new workflow in SharePoint Designer that copies any item created in “Insurance Dashboards – Deploy” to “Insurance Dashboards”. (Serendipitously, the folder structure won’t be maintained by the copy… )

When deploying a dashboard in Dashboard Designer I target “Insurance Dashboards – Deploy” instead of “Insurance Dashboards”:

The workflow makes a copy of each page to “Insurance Dashboards”, leaving the folder structure behind.

Thoughts on The “SharePoint Workflow” Way

We might add a step that deletes the deployed after the copy occurs.
How might we handle page collisions? (We might rename, do a forced overwrite, or go into a holding pattern when this happens. I haven’t tried any of these things yet.)
This pattern might be useful for other things, such as altering the content of some dashboard pages, particularly to add a custom web part. This is also something I haven’t tried, but if anyone has, please let me know!

Any other thoughts? Please leave comments here on the blog.

PerformancePoint Monitoring SDK content from TechEd

Wade Dorrell — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:19:00 GMT

Here's the sample code and slides I showed about the PerformancePoint SDK at TechEd.

A couple notes:

The build OutputDir and xcopy post-build steps assume default locations for PerformancePoint assemblies, the Monitoring Web Service, and SharePoint :80 web application, as discussed in the BIN08-TLC slides. Please take a look and make sure they're right for your environment.
To get the samples working you'll need to alter the *.config files. See config-readme.txt for details. Let me know if you need help, I think this is the trickiest part.
If you want to use the "Live Search"-based custom data source implementation, please apply for your own Live Search application ID and insert it in SearchDataSourceProvider.cs. (It'll take about 15 minutes for the application ID to become active; until then feel free to use mine.)

Thanks!

Wade Dorrell — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:47:38 GMT

To everyone who attended my sessions and whom I talked to at TechEd 08: thank you! I got some of the PerformancePoint Monitoring SDK feedback I was looking for, both during the sessions, and especially in follow-on talks. I hope they, and the other breakouts and other sessions you attended were valuable. I will personally guarantee (and in fact you win a Zune 4GB if you prove me wrong) that you now more about the PerformancePoint SDK than 98% of the attendees.

I'll have the code samples for "KPI Detail Report" and "(Live) Search Data Source Provider" posted soon. I'm tweaking the path dependencies such that they work on any machine where PerformancePoint Monitoring is installed/configured, not just my VPC... with all the killer discussion, demoing, and learning going on, and the usual side conversations with Leif about Windows Media Center... I haven't gotten as far on that as I planned.

Processing 74% Complete. Please wait...

PerformancePoint 2007 SDK at TechEd!

Wade Dorrell — Fri, 30 May 2008 23:17:58 GMT

I'll be facilitating 2 chalk-talks/Q&As in the TLC Interactive Theatre (small audience) at Tech·Ed 2008 Developers about PerformancePoint:

BIN03-TLC "Navigating the Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 SDK"
June 3 3:00PM-4:15PM
Green Theater 2

BIN08-TLC "Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007: Custom Data Connectors and Report Types"
June 5 8:30AM-9:45AM
Green Theater 2

The first is going to be very high level. We want to give you a feel for what's possible with the SDK and to give you time to get SDK-specific questions answered & to get your feedback. Please let us know what scenarios we should add/tune up for the next version! If time allows, I'll show you a few samples that might get you thinking, including a KPI detail report, and a search keyword data source, and a KPI syndication solution. I'd mostly like to talk with those of you who are using the SDK, so please plan attend the 2nd session instead/also if you want deeper dive demos.

The second session will be a "show me the code"-type session, on the KPI detail report & keyword data source, tuned for those who have not already tried the SDK. It's at 8:30AM Eastern... so it'll also be a "show me the coffee"-type session.

Please stop by!