PerformancePoint

Microsoft BI Conference 2008

John Workman — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:19:57 GMT

It's official! I'm now registered for the BI Conference 2008 in Seattle from October 6-8, 2008. I'm very excited about this event. It looks like there are going to be some good sessions, although I was hoping they would some MDX sessions. Looks like you have to wait for PASS Community Summit 2008 for those. The likelihood of me swinging a second trip to Seattle a month later is slim to none.

If there are any other GWB members that are planning to be there, let me know. It would be great to meet up.

PerformancePoint - Resizing Parameters

John Workman — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 03:50:13 GMT

One of the things that used to drive me crazy with PerformancePoint was that I could only fit two drop down parameters on the top of a dashboard. I finally found this post that explains how to adjust it. It works great. Then tonight, I was trying to do it again and I had to search forever for it, so here it is. Preserved forever.

If you need to change the width of the parameter drop downs in PerformancePoint Server 2007, check out this link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/performancepoint/archive/2007/12/18/working-with-the-monitoring-css-files-to-adjust-settings-in-deployed-dashboards.aspx

PerformancePoint Server 2007 - Documentation Map

John Workman — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:21:41 GMT

Aseem Nayar posted a Documentation Map for Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 at the following link: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/HA102422371033.aspx

It's great to see that the documentation is starting to flow.

Here's a link to some training videos too. http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/resources/training.aspx

How to rename a server (continued)... With Proclarity

John Workman — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:06:55 GMT

As I wrote about yesterday, I am in the process of building out virtual images with PerformancePoint. I figured out how to rename the server and have both SharePoint Services and PerformancePoint work (see yesterday's post.)

Today, while working with the server, I realized that none of my Proclarity views were working. I tried several things and finally I gave up, uninstalled the Proclarity Analytics Server and re-installed it. This worked great in getting it up and running. Only took about 10 minutes. Once that was taken care of, the Proclarity reports still didn't work. I thought I had a great idea and I set everything up as http://localhost instead of the server name. So I went through every report on my server and pointed them from the older server to localhost. This was a slow process, but once it was done everything worked great.... FROM my machine. As soon as I ran the dashboard from another box, it failed. The moral of the story is, DO NOT use localhost as the server name in Proclarity reports. I thought I was saving myself some effort if I clone the VS. I then had to go back and reset them all to the new server name. This is a pain because I did it all by hand. Soon I will document the steps to save this off as a BSWX file and modify the xml to change the urls. This is a much more efficient way to go, especially if you have to do it twice.

Once this was done, everything worked great. If I find a better way to handle Proclarity, I'll re-post. In the meantime, this works, so give it a try.

How to rename a server running SharePoint and PerformancePoint

John Workman — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:22:43 GMT

I'm in an running Virtual images for development and demos that are stand along PerformancePoint Servers. They are running Windows Server 2003, SQLServer 2005, SharePoint Services 3.0, and PerformancePoint Server. I have a development environment and a DMZ environment that can each run 5 instances of the Virtual image. To make this setup easier, we created a "gold" image that we will use as our baseline image for each of the environments.

If you try to do this, what you will quickly find out is that all hell breaks loose when you go to rename the server. SharePoint hates it. PerformancePoint hates it. It's just a bad seen. fortunately, I'm managed to figure this out. And fortunately, I managed to document (most of it). I have to repeat this process several more times, so I will update this post when I find things that I failed to document.

How to rename a server running SharePoint Services 3.0.

Prior to renaming the server, you need to run a command line exe called stsadm.exe.

To do this, go to start=>run=>cmd
Navigate to c:\program files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN
Type the following command
- Stsadm.exe -o renameserver -oldservername <oldServerName> -newservername <newServerName>

Now you can go to My Computer => Properties and rename the server.

Obviously you need to reboot after this.

Now that you are up and running, open a browser and go to your SharePoint site.

Change administrator name

Click the down arrow next to Welcome …. My Settings

Modify the account name (currently has local box\name)

How to rename a server running PerformancePoint

There are multiple places that you need to change to update the server name. If you are in a position like I am with the demo boxes where everything runs local, I am setting everything to "localhost" instead of the server name. This only works well an environment like mine where these are dev boxes and everything runs stand alone on the same box. Otherwise you want to update it with the new server name. Here's a list of the places I wrote down. I'll update this if I find any that I'm missing.

Navigate to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\80
Open web.config
Find and replace the old server name with the new (or localhost in my case)

Navigate to c:\program files\microsoft office performancepoint server\3.0\monitoring\ppsmonitoring_1\webservice
Open web.config
Find and replace the old server name with the new (or localhost in my case)

Navigate to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\3.0\Monitoring\Preview
Open web.config
Find and replace the old server name with the new (or localhost in my case)

Navigate to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\3.0\Tools\MonitoringConfiguration
Open monitoringConfig.xml
Find and replace the old server name with the new (or localhost in my case)

Like I said, with this many changes, it likely that I forgot to writedown one, but hopefully this gets you started.

The next step is to go through and update all of our datasources in PerformancePoint to point to the new server name (or localhost if appropriate)

Users Give PerformancePoint a Big Thumbs-Up (Part 2 of 2)

John Workman — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:32:13 GMT

Here's part two of Stephen Swoyer's article on PerformancePoint Server. Great quotes! :)

http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8804

http://www.esj.com/business_intelligence/article.aspx?EditorialsID=8804

Users Give PerformancePoint a Big Thumbs-Up

John Workman — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:19:46 GMT

Check out this article that I'm quoted in, "Users Give PerformancePoint a Big Thumbs-Up". I've seen it under two links:

http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8799

http://www.esj.com/business_intelligence/article.aspx?EditorialsID=8799

It's a nice piece by Stephen Swoyer about PerformancePoint Server.