Thanks to Brian and others for pointing out a set of links to white papers and articles on reporting services.

I will be interested to read the one on localization and performance monitoring. I like the fact that in reporting services it is possible to track each stage of a reports execution performance from the ExecutionLog table.

Thinking this on a bit whilst walking to the station I was considering how good it would be if the upcoming PerformancePoint product included by default a set of performance monitoring models (cubes) and KPIs for its own operations. It would be a great differentiator and would appeal to the IT decision makers involved in making the product choice. Even better if the PerformancePoint team could talk to the MOM and server teams to produce a set of IT models.

Way back at the Microsoft Partner Conference I saw a short demo of RSInteract. This is a totally web based report building tool that sits over SQL Server Reporting Services (2000/5)  and I was impressed.

Today I had a web demo of it again including the new OLAP report building in the new release. As always in a demo there is a lot to take in but some of the things I really liked were:

• It is very light weight being a pure web app.
• The ability to edit an existing report is very easy.
• The user can preview the changes without having to commit them.
• Multiple combinations of tables and graphs can be built into one report. This is a really nice feature.
• The functionality and UI has been broken up in a nice easy to understand manner.
• None of the underlying Reporting Services power and functionality has been lost. It is just made easier.

The down sides to this silver bullet of report writing are:

• It does not use the report models for relational data sources. You have to create and expose views for the end user.
• there is an additional cost over and above SQL Server Licences. That said when compared to other ad-hoc report builders in the market it is still cheap with what appears to be much greater functionality.

I have just installed it and will be evaluating it myself over the coming week so more later.

Does anyone have any experiance with this product or something similar for comparison?

Well day three is over and I did get a lot out of it.

The PerformancePoint bits were great to see and I am looking forward to getting my hands on it. However, I do think that having seen the current gulf between the MS components and the ProClarity ones in terms of integration that the team will have their work cut out.

The Business Scorecard Manager day was a good refresh from the training course I did on it. It is a nice tool but I still think the Builder app could do with a lot of usability studies. It seems a bit disjointed at the moment. I am assured that the V2 product is much tidier.

I really enjoyed getting into Proclarity. I had always meant to get it installed and have a go but never did. I now consider it a must have. Even if it is just as a powerful cube browser and MDX generator. I shall certainly be including it in my demo stack.

It was also nice that there was a 2 way dialogue and Ryan Buma ( Microsoft’s director of business development for Office business applications) seemed to take onboard some of the points that were made. Namely:

• Microsoft need to get the BSM, Proclarity, PerformancePoint, Excel, Sharepoint, Visio and SQL Server teams locked together in a padded room with a senior exec who should be armed with a large LART. They should then decide and CLEARLY state what the message is on KPIs. There is way too much confusion about what tools fit where.
• When the teams are allowed out they should then be locked up with the Dynamics teams. It is the Dynamics product lines that will be driving the lions share of sales of the MS BI products. So get it together and make it work together. This will be even more imperative when PerformancePoint comes out. In fairness Ryan did say they were working on it but that it was hard. We know its hard!

Anyway my thanks to Ryan, Bruce Alpert, Jan Van Dijk, Andrew Sadler, Danielle and the rest of the team for a well worth will 3 days. Enjoy Munich!

and its huge!

I am doing the Microsoft Partner BI Bootcamp and yesterday was the first day.

Amongst many things that we were shown was the new Biz# Performance Management tool. In the past I have seen screenshots and I have considered it to be only a holder and management tool for cubes.

My assumptions were very wrong. There was so much more to it that I missed some of the points but what I did get was that it is a full blown performance management tool.

In this tool you define dimensions and cubes (called models) as one would expect. You can also define security as one would expect. What I did not expect is the ability to define complex consolidation processes, business rules and workflow.

There is the ability to model large complex companies with multiple currencies, multiple reporting rules and consolidation rules.

It is possible to establish a master definition of the whole process and then use this as a template for subsiduries. In this way global models can be defined and local additions made.

In order to define the rules there is a new rule language. The idea of this is that business analysts can define rules without needing to know MDX or TSQL. You define the rule using this syntax and this is then translated into MDX or TSQL as appropriate. When I first heard this I groaned thinking that I would need to learn another new language, but, I think that the syntax is nice and simple. The problem I can see is that there is a danger that this approach as the result might be too intimidating for some and too simplistic to deal with the more complex processes. I dont know it will need to be properly understood and I didnt get that yet.

The Biz# Component also manages the performance gathering operations. This includes the forms which are written and completed in Excel. There is a workflow engine included in PerformancePoint but because of the different release cycles at Microsoft this is not currently the Windows Workflow or Sharepoint workflow. This may change in the future.

There are so many nice bits already visible in the application, for example if a forecast is made on the basis of a formula then that formula is recorded as well as the resulting forecast value. It is also possible to define how parent forecasts can be distributed through children. (It was spotted by an eagle eyed atendee that this was not quite right as sometimes the sum of the children did not quite add up to the parent. This may have beed a rounding error but it was not clear).

Once you have defined the models you deploy them to a server. From then on there is multy users editing with check in and out. The deploy process can create all the cubes and associated Analysis Services functionality. It will also build a staging database to support the cubes and simplify the data imports required.

Overall this is going to be a stunning suite in the Performance Management space. I can see that THE skill to have in the future is going to be Business Analysis and Performance Point and Microsoft are setting up a partner specalisation and exams to support this. When you see the scope and scale of the product and then include the Business Scorecard and Proclarity suites as well then there is a strong product which would do well on its own. Throw in the aggressive pricing strategy Microsoft are intending and it will be a winner.

The road map is that the Biz# Performance modeling tool will be in Beta on 11th November. (The BSM and Proclarity are of course out already). The pricing will be announced in Q1 2007 and the full integrated product should be RTM in June 2007. (NB These dates are as currently standing and may be subject to change …. etc etc)

One final thing that I have noticed. The positioning of Reporting Services seems to be moving. It is now being shown as further down the stack – moving more into the back office side with SQL RDMS and less in the user tools space. From the perspective of PerformancePoint it seems that Proclarity will be the dominant reporting tool. Reporting Services is more targeted at Line of business reporting .

Onward to todays sessions.

Thanks to Erik who says that Business Scorecard Manager Rollup 4 is now out

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b122139c-6625-456a-9f39-f8a8fb0246a2&DisplayLang=en

From the KB:

Issue that the update rollup fixes

This update rollup fixes the following issue that was not previously documented in a Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

Thanks to Brian for pointing out this excellent post on Reporting Services 2005 best practices.

It also contains a good range of sample code for achieving some nice features. I haven’t got through it all and I suspect that there are a number of other equally good posts on the site to explore.

I must make time to clean up some of my content and post it. Maybe next week!

Saw a strange conjunction of posts today.

First Mark pointed out that Business Objects and SAP have parted ways and are no longer partners. This caused a 22% share plunge.

The next post was from Brian Welcker who announced that Microsoft Reporting Services (SSRS) has achieved SAP certification.

Coincidence? Probably (Esp as the BO news is a few weeks old) but indicative of how the BI space is being shaken up.

Myles Matheson reports that Windows Update has deemed SQL Server 2005 SP 1 a critical update and installed it on his laptop. This means that it can get installed without your knowledge depending on your Windows Update settings.

Now I am all in favor of running the latest SP and most of the ones I have dealt with are, but it is also the case that on most production machines we don’t have control of the Windows Update. That is managed by the client’s IT department. If they apply this without testing then there is a chance that it will break some reports. Well I will wait for the phone call and bump up the change and testing of the reports.

Just been trawling through the postings by Tech Ed visitors and found these which are worth noting.

Andrew Connell points out that the Office Web Components are not being advanced anymore in favor of the Office Server components that will  give server based spreadsheet type functionality.

Federal Developer points out to new BizTalk documentation and samples

This post has a great list of  Sharepoint 2007 Web Parts. I particularly like the content aggregation parts that show lists of content and sites the user is a member of. Oh and all the cool KPI stuff of course. Thanks to Ian Morrish and Bill English for the pointer

We have a client that required the ability to writeback expenditure forecasts to their Analysis Services cube. Nothing fancy but it had to be very simple to use as this forecasting was being rolled out to fairly junior managers.
My first plan was to use the Microsoft Excel addin for Analysis Services tool. This installs as an addin and allows users to build reports based on a cube and then writeback data to the cube.
Unfortunately I found it to be very cumbersome to use to write the report and also very unreliable. Sometimes drill downs would simply not work. It also failed the simplicity test required for the end users. In fact there were
The result of spending a day wrestling with it was that I ditched it, pulled out my VBA archived brain and wrote my own addin to do it.
In actual fact the critical core of code was not as painful as I had expected.
First I build an update string:
UpdateString = "UPDATE CUBE [Dev Cube] SET ("
UpdateString = UpdateString & "[Dim Accounts].[AccountFull].[Department Full].&"
UpdateString = UpdateString & "[P].&"
UpdateString = UpdateString & "[PB].&"
UpdateString = UpdateString & "[PB00].&"
UpdateString = UpdateString & "[PB8010].&"
UpdateString = UpdateString & "[K].&"
UpdateString = UpdateString & "[K0500]"
UpdateString = UpdateString & ",[Dim Fiscal Periods].[Hierarchy].[Fiscal Year].&[2006/2007].&[4],"
UpdateString = UpdateString & "[Measures].[Forecast Amount]) = (500 )"

Then I execute it as an ADO connection command

ConnectionString = "Provider=MSOLAP;Connect Timeout=30;Client Cache Size=25;Auto Synch Period=1000;Safety Options=2;Data Source=srv01;Initial Catalog=DEVCubes;"

Set objdbConnection = New ADODB.Connection
objdbConnection.Mode = adModeReadWrite
objdbConnection.CursorLocation = adUseServer
objdbConnection.IsolationLevel = adXactReadCommitted

objdbConnection.Open sConnectString

objdbConnection.BeginTrans
objdbConnection.Execute strUpdate
objdbConnection.CommitTrans

If Not objdbConnection Is Nothing Then
‘ The connection exists, so check it’s state
If objdbConnection.State = adStateOpen Then
‘ Close the connection
objdbConnection.Close
End If
End If

The fun parts were interacting with Excel to loop through the cells building the Update string and generally manipulating them into an intuitive solution

Its just a pity they are too early to go for PerformancePoint as this seems to rock at doing this very type of thing.