CEDANIEL.COM

This post applies to PerformancePoint 2007

PeformancePoint 2007 is Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Environment that tightly integrates with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). This product is very difficult to get a stable installation working, so I decided to add a couple of comments here that helped me as I attempted to dodge all the road blocks involved in the install process. First of all, I guess the good news is that Microsoft has decided to integrate this product with their MOSS 2010 product so a separate install will no longer be needed. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing yet.

Here are some things that will help:

• Use MS SQL Server 2005 SP 2 or MS SQL Server 2008 as your database install
• I recommend you use an NT Service account with elevated privileges to the database server. In fact, I recommend you do the entire installation under a service account and setup everything with the service account as the primary administrator of all services.
• Before installing any of the PerformancePoint 2007 services, make sure you have ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX extensions 1.0 found here:
  Click Here
• Before installing any of the PerformancePoint 2007 services, make sure you have ADOMD.NET 9.0 (SP 2) installed found here: Click Here
• Make sure you upgrade your installed services to PerformancePoint 2007 SP2 (as of the time of this post – this is my best recommendation)
• If you do not install PerformancePoint 2007 SP2 you will notice that certain services will be unavailable for install during the installation wizards. Example: Planning Process Service and Planning Web Service will not be available during the installation of PerformancePoint Planning.

Once you are able to successfully connect to a data source with PerformancePoint Designer, you will be able to develop dashboards and post them to MOSS 2007 Document libraries or Reporting repositories. I recommend you using the Enterprise Reporting site template.

Also, if you are unable to connect to a SharePoint List with PerformancePoint Dashboard, you will most likely need to give the PerformancePoint Service Account elevated privileges to the SharePoint Site and List. This service account will be the account used by IIS Application Pool that was created by PerformancePoint during the Install (found in the Identity tab).

DO NOT:

Install .NET Framework 3.5 before installing PeformancePoint Monitoring. After PeformancePoint Monitoring is installed, then install .NET Framework 3.5

Hope this post helps someone. This is a very frustrating product to get working well. More posts to follow with details on the usage of PerformancePoint.

This post applies to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0

Over the past 2 years I have implemented numerous SharePoint solutions to automate business processes. I’ve learned to improve upon certain design strategies each time. It seems as though most of the time, business owners have learned that SharePoint can be used to track information as it flows from one location within the organization to another. In most cases, the information is going through some type of approval process. With the birth of SharePoint 2007/WSS 3.0, we have been able to leverage Workflows within SharePoint to pass information through some type of simple or complicated business process. After some time, I just threw away most of the out of the box SharePoint workflows and task lists. As your organization begins to demand your services using SharePoint, your requirements will get extremely complicated.

Dashboards in my world are usually associated with analysis systems which render results from some sort of aggregated data or cube. This type of dashboard usage is usually associated with business intelligence. However, in my experience dashboards are also useful for tracking the state of data as it goes through a transactional process.

There are a couple of things which have helped me build nice dashboards using SharePoint to track where the state of information is at in a business process. Most of my work is done in SharePoint Designer when creating the Dashboard.

• I usually grab some of the images from the 12 hive that are commonly used by SharePoint services to build KPI lists. Take a look at the 12 hive and you will find all kinds of useful stop lights and other dashboard-like images.
• I create a custom .aspx page with SharePoint designer, then insert a Data view. Once I have inserted the Data view I view the Source of a local list. Then I insert the fields I want as a Multi Item View.
• Now that I have a Multi Item View on my custom .aspx page, I can add images and apply conditional formatting to “Show” the images based on the specific state of the data.

More on how I work with the “state” of the data:

SharePoint can present quite a challenge when you are trying to track the state of data. What I usually do in situations where the solution is difficult to solve is I create additional fields in the list that will serve as switches. Basically, when a specific state has been met in the business process I will design a workflow that changes the data in the “switch” field to another value. For instance, if “Business Owner X” has approved some type of information then change the “Switch X” field from 0 to 1. Then the next time a transaction is made on the system, you can test “Switch X” to see if it has already been executed and prevent a repeat of the process. You can also use this technique to avoid the workflow from executing an infinite loop. Now that you have a switch field that has data within a specific state, you can test your conditional formatting of the image on the dashboard for this specific state.

I know that this blog post is not very visual, but it may help someone.

This post applies to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0

Scenario: In many cases SharePoint Lists can grow to be 1000s of rows. Often, you are required to build a report of some kind based upon the data being collected in the SharePoint list. It is an easy solution to build custom views with SharePoint services or SharePoint Designer to render the data in the form of a report. However, I have noticed that once the data grows to a large number, a more advanced approach is needed to aggregate the data with a method that is optimal for performance. When the list grows to 1000s of rows, views tend to be more difficult and perform poorly (depending on what you are trying to display).

Solution: Initially, I started to experiment with getting data out of a SharePoint List via MS Access 2007. There is a great tool that is available via MS Access that allows you to do this and may be optimal for your solution. However, in my experience the performance of MS Access begins to decline greatly once you get data from a list in the numbers of 1000s. It also seems difficult for Access 2007 to accomplish this task across a network when retrieving 1000s of rows of data.

There are also some custom solutions that can be achieved by building a web application that pulls data from a list by programming against SharePoint services. However, in most cases I found this to be just too much trouble for such a simple task.

What I have successfully used and recommend is SQL Server Integration Services. This solution will work for both SQL Server 2005 (SP 2) and SQL Server 2008. Microsoft has released a tool that can be installed and used with the Business Intelligence Studio that comes with SQL Server 2005/2008. This tool installs two additional options that can be used when building an Integration Services Package. It allows you to pull data from a list and send it to SQL server – OR – take data from SQL server and send it to a SharePoint List. It is very effective.

Read this post from MSDN for instructions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd365137.aspx

Go here to download the .msi files (You will see the 2005 adapter available for download): http://www.codeplex.com/SQLSrvIntegrationSrv/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=17652

Additionally, using this package I was successful in pulling data from a SharePoint List and Importing it into a MySQL database running on Mac OSX server. To do this, you will need to install the MySQL ODBC or ADO.net drivers onto the SQL server box. I may create a separate post specifically on how to do this.

Thank you for checking out my blog.