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?

Picked up this useful tit bit

Those who are trying to integrate Ax 3.0 clients with BizTalk Server 2006 and Analysis Server 2005, please note that at the time of writing this may not be possible.

Particularly with Analysis Server 2005 (AS 2005), the problem seems to stem from the fact that whereas by default AS 2006 has moved away from DSO (Decision Support Objects), Ax 3.0 is basically a DSO enabled program. Though (to some extent) Ax 3.0 is able to speak to AS 2005 using the backward compatibility feature of AS, subsequently when you try to view the cube inside Ax 3.0 it falls through.

As Touchstone do a fair bit of Axapta work this could have bitten us.

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!

I was just browsing around waiting for the kids to let me downstairs and wanted to visit Pod Tech, the start up that Robert Scoble left Microsoft for. I tried a url but missed so I went to Robert’s blog expecting to find it there, but NO link. I wonder why? Is there some rule against it? I am proud of where I work and have links to it all over the place.

EDIT: I see that in small print in his side bar it says:

“Robert Scoble works at PodTech.net (title: Vice President of Media …”

So I could have got it from there but a proper link would have stood out far more.

I have just checked out the agenda for our annual client conference at the Hotel Russell, London, and I see that I have 3 X 45 min sessions on Microsoft BI products and futures.

Time to get the Lego and toys out. I think I need a new gimmick this time. I wonder how rusty my juggling is?

I think the conference is for Clients but in the  event that anyone really wants to come along I will talk to the organizers and see how space is doing. I know we were approaching the 200 mark not too long ago so I don’t know how spaces is going.

Whilst digging out some paperwork from my boss’ desk I spotted a box marked ProClarity. Inside I found a complete partner evaluation set for ProClarity 6 and a demo setup. Should be fun to play with this and be able to demo it. It will also give insight into what PerformancePoint will be delivering. I have signed up for the Performance Point beta but unfortunately that is under an NDA.

Over the last few weeks I have been having a number of discussions with people in our Company about the strategy we are going to take forward. Now this is not the forum for these discuss this but I have just come from one such discussion and then read this post from 37 Signals.

The second half is very pertinent, not just for our business but for everyone.

This is a Q & A session transcript with the corporate VP of Microsoft Office Business Applications, Lewis Levin.

I have not finished it all yet but it outlines the Microsoft Strategy for BI and in particular PerformancePoint.

It is a bit wooly in many areas with management speak taking over . I was particularly disappointed by this section.

PressPass: How does PerformancePoint relate to Microsoft Dynamics?

Levin: We’ve worked closely with the Microsoft Business Solutions team during the planning and development of PerformancePoint. The Microsoft Dynamics roadmap includes plans to take advantage of and integrate with PerformancePoint by tailoring it for the specific needs of Microsoft Dynamics customers, including specific efforts to ensure that the functionality and capabilities found in present Microsoft Dynamics BI solutions are integrated with and available as part of PerformancePoint.

It is my contention that the primary way that this will get infront of users is as a value added proposition to Dynamics sales and to existing Dynamics users. This deserves more than a couple of lines of management babble and some concrete road maps.

Thanks to John Westworth for the pointer to the CRM 3.0 Business Scorecard Analyzer templates.

This will really help kick start some work I am looking to demo, along the lines of some very good data mining demos I saw at the Partner Conference.

The download is here.

Well I made it.

We had a launch event for Axapta 4.0 last night where Steve Balmer did his bit.

I did not arrive in time for the full event but the bit I did see seemed good.

The UI seems to be nice – very Outlook in style. Users can create their own favorites and it is possible to get at items and records from a unified search bar.

How much impact this will have overall remains to be seem.

Wat was really interesting was the amount of work that has gone into BI and integration.

These are now sharepoint web parts and Axapta processes can be built into the workflow engine.

There are now  SSAS 2005 cubes available and it seems that there is a SSRS Report Model available. This means that the ability to do ad-hoc reporting and Scorecarding will be much much easier.

I was not totally convinced from the short demo that it will totally work, especially as Axapta – Sorry Dynamics AX – is so customizable. There seemed to be a bit too much smoke and mirrors but that could just have been the demo environment. I will try to get to the stand and find out.