Book Recommendation: Drive Business Performance

Good sales staff for consulting and services firms are hard to find. These great sales people are always working to strike the balance between knowing enough about the services, and in our case, the Microsoft products to talk intelligibly, but at the same time, not be overwhelmed in studying details and product nuances so that they are distracted from selling.

Bruno and Joey's "Drive Business Performance, Enabling a Culture of Intelligent Execution" is a great aide for business intelligence consultants looking to help their sales leads to understand the BI thought process and lift the talk away from fancy Excel charting and into true performance management.

While this book may be a bit of a slow read for someone mainly focused on technology implementation, I still recommend it. As consultants, we still need to bring our clients along with our solutions, and this primer can help with those talking points around people and organization, not just the tools.

June 25, 2009 14:32 by Sid
E-mail | Permalink | Comments (6) | Comment RSS

Central Texas BI User Group First Meeting

We kicked off the first BI User group meeting for Austin last night and had a very decent turn out for our first meeting.

For our first topic, I covered the sticky points of implementing Kerberos in order to support Reporting Services 2008 running in integrated mode in a MOSS farm. As doing the entire implementation would take longer than the time allotted for our meeting, I will be posting a write-up for anyone to download and see all the steps.

Based on feedback from the group, I will expand this to show a four server farm and all the necessary steps there-in; I had on my laptop an AD server, Web and App and database, but as I can live with slogging performance for the sake of writing a walk through, I will add the last machine to the line up so that it represents the way many in the BI User group and our customers have their MOSS farms implemented.

Also in this mix is a few of us waiting with bated breath so see the SharePoint Kerberos Configuration Utility, something put together by Spencer Harbar, but that no one has seen released yet – if I can get a copy, or find where he is eventually going to post it, I will be sure to update that reference here.

June 18, 2009 15:33 by sid
E-mail | Permalink | Comments (2) | Comment RSS

64 bit Report Builder 2.0 Installation Issues in SharePoint Integrated Mode

If you wish to upgrade to SSRS Report Builder 2.0 and you are on a 64-bit environment, you may run into this issue when running the April 7, 2009 download:

Text (so it is search-able): Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint products and technologies is not installed. It must be installed before you can install the SQL Server 2008 Report Builder 2.0 for SharePoint.

If you are like me when you got this error, you first thought reaction is: "but I did! What is going on? I know I have everything installed!".

Relax, it is not your fault. This time (provided you are like me and on a 64 bit platform).

To confirm, check out this thread on Microsoft Connect to confirm your sanity and also vote this issue as a priority. In addition to other users adding their comments about, some have posted work-arounds to the issue. I find a couple of them rather complicated and opted for another method that has thus far suited me very well. Below are the steps:

1. Download the stand-alone install for Report Builder 2.0 and install it on the app server/server hosting SSRS.
2. Go to your site's Central Admin and click on the Set server defaults link

   

3. Modify the Custom Report Builder launch URL. In my example, the URL value is: http://localhost/ReportServer/ReportBuilder/ReportBuilder_2_0_0_0.application

   

4. Publish a Report Data Source or Report Model content type to your site, then from the Create actions on the list, select new report builder report. If you get the 2.0 version, you have installed it and set the Central Admin settings correctly.
5. Once in Report Builder, there is one last setting. Click the round start button in the upper left corner and then select Options. The Report Builder Options will pop open and you will need to fill in the top option with a value so that you can access the data sources from the lists on your SharePoint site.

   

While this works, it is not the most ideal in my mind as the user has to enter the SharePoint site URL, making usage of Report Builder not entirely intuitive. I did find a Report Builder config file in the install directory with an option to set this value - -hopefully making it effective for any launch of the app, however I did not find this to be the case. Any value inputted there was ignored by the application URL, however only recognized by a direct launch of the executable from the install directory.

If I find how to modify this setting server side, I will be sure to post, but for the time being, here is a simple work around for enabling Report Builder 2.0 in 64 bit SharePoint integrated environments.

June 16, 2009 11:13 by Sid
E-mail | Permalink | Comments (15) | Comment RSS

Adding PerformancePoint Web Parts to multiple sites on the same SharePoint Server

Without fail, there exist many ways to resolve an issue. Mine? I have multiple WSS web applications on my machine for various purposes, several of which require the PerformancePoint web parts.

For anyone having gone through a deployment of PerformancePoint Monitoring, the appreciation of the problem becomes quite plain: the site collection is declared during the initial setup and configuration – so how do you "redeploy" to another site collection?

There is the fun way posted here on the PerformancePoint team blog.

And then there is the easy way:

1. Open the MonitoringConfig.xml file, located at Root:\Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\3.0\Tools\MonitoringConfiguration in Notepad or some other raw editor
2. Remove the configuration item with ID WebParts, pictured below:

   

3. Start up the Monitoring and select Add components

   

4. On the next screen, you will have the fourth item, Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services un-greyed and available to select. Select this item and follow the rest of the wizard.
5. Confirm installation by going to your selected site collection, add a web part and look for this item in the web part collection:

I highly recommend reading through the related PerformancePoint team blog as it is important to understand what changes you are affecting, and more importantly, be able to troubleshoot should anything go awry.

June 8, 2009 17:37 by Sid
E-mail | Permalink | Comments (9) | Comment RSS