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Dan Meyers' - BI BlogBusiness Intelligence - Driving the Information Age
November 26 Capstone Consulting Group is Hiring BI Consultants!I work for a consulting group out of Ann Arbor, MI named Capstone Consulting Group, LLC. We are growing and are looking to hire a few new consultants. You can live anywhere in the continental US and do NOT have to relocate to Michigan. You would be traveling or working from home. We are looking for individuals who specialize in the Microsoft BI suite and know MDX. You will be expected to be proficient in all phases of development including but not limited to:
Requirements:
If you are interested please forward me your resume: dan@capstonecg.com Please include the following:
November 08 Excited About PerformancePoint?I don't know about you but I am not seeing or hearing too much buzz or excitement about the release of PPS like I think everyone expected. As I go from client to client and blog to blog I get feeling that many people are some what satisfied with ProClairty 6.3 and are not in any hurry to move to PPS anytime soon. I kinda feel the same way. Until Microsoft gets around to consolidating and fully integrating the ProClarity products in I think many people will be sticking with what they have for now. There is an ever growing camp of users who perfer not to go to any new Microsoft product until at least SP1 and add on top of that the fact that it is a brand new v1.0 product sure to have many bugs and I think this helps explain the luke-warm repsonse to the release that I have seen.
Personally, I think that the majority of people that are moving forward with it are doing so to take advantage of the M & A components more than the Planning components. Or they are just getting into BI all together and are starting out with PPS. As far as the Planning components go, it feels like when Microsoft first introduced Analysis Services with SQL Server. Nobody bought SQL Server for AS but eventually it caught on. There is obviously a big demand out there for KPI, scorecard, and dashboard software but that is not what Microsoft has been focusing on when it comes to the release of PPS. They have been pushing the Planning components more than anything. I assume this is because they are trying to go after some of the market share that Hyperion and some of the other vendors have in this space but I don't think that is why most people will buy it.
I have also been hearing some complaints about it being so integrated with MOSS. Many businesses already use MOSS but are not ready to make it part of their BI solution. Plus I think it makes some BI developers squirm a little because it just adds a layer of complexity that they have not had to deal with as of yet. The web interfaces of ProClarity and Reporting Services are independant and some what simple when compared to MOSS. I do however, hear a lot of complaints about not having one portal that easily and intuitively serves up both ProClarity views and Reporting Services reports. Hopefully it will not be too long before they get the technologies integrated.
Maybe I am alone in my little world here...what do you think? What have you heard? November 07 Microsoft Enterprise CubeMicrosoft is working on a project called Microsoft Enterprise Cube. Microsoft Services is creating packaged ready-to-deploy BI solutions that extract the data points needed to form their pre-built cubes through their ETL layer and into the analytics layer provided by PPS. From what I hear they will even be providing an ODS along with pre-built charts, KPIs and scorecards which are displayed through MOSS 2007 and ProClarity. My guess is that all you have to do is map your data to their predefined data templates which will focus around specific areas of certain industries. The only thing that I am curious about is whether or not these will be available to the public or if these will only be provided by the Microsoft Services team themselves. There is not a lot of info available on the web about this stuff. The only mention that I could find is on the DBCF blog by Mark Kromer, senior project manager for BI solutions at Microsoft. If anyone has anymore on this plase pass it along. June 15 Accessing the SSRS Web Service from a SSIS PackageBy request, Mark Garner just threw up a post about how to get at the SSRS web service from within an SSIS package. This type of integration becomes very important as your BI system gets more sophisticated. I have recently been tasked to do some RS administration and need a bit more control of the processes running before and after when I want my adminstration to occurr and asked Mark if he could whip something up. Well he delivered and here it is...
June 14 Free Data Mining Material from Stalford SystemsFound a link in the KDNuggets.com newsletter for a set of free data mining webcasts, software, walkthroughs, & data sets from Salford Data Mining. I have not taken a look at it all yet but I thought that I would pass it along for anyone who is interested. Here is the link and a quote from the KDnuggets page.
Quote
June 07 Tufte-Compliant Excel ChartsNifty little Excel Add-In that cleans up your Excel charts. Below is a blurb from the website. Quote
June 05 Picking Stocks with the Association AlgorithmThere is a very interesting post by Eugene Asahara. He walks you through a good example of how to use the Association algorithm in SQL Server 2005. It is a good read, check it out:
SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) Webcasts & CTP DownloadI am going to piggyback off of a post I just saw on Chris Webb's blog again. Looks like Microsoft has scheduled some upcoming webcasts to demonstrate some fo the features on SQL Server 2008. Here is a quote from Euan Garden's blog. You can also download the latest CTP on Connect.
Quote
Here is a link to the post: http://blogs.msdn.com/euanga/archive/2007/06/04/sql-server-2008-web-casts.aspx
June 03 Intelligencia Olap ControlsRight after I read Chris Webb's post about Intelligencia's Olap Controls I was contacted by Andrew Wiles. He asked me to take a look and let him know what I thought. I did not spend a whole lot of time playing with it but below are a few things that jumped out at me.
Pros
- Love the Office look and feel...this will go a long way with making the end-user feel comfortable. - Love the MDX Calculations ribbion, it really sorts the functions out very nicely. - Love the Fx text box that displays the current intersection. - Asymmetric Queries (Multiple Subqueries on rows and columns) feature is very cool but not intuitively accessible. - Visual Totals option is nice but with it being so accessibe I fear that users will use it too much and write alot of bad performing queries.
Cons
- No headers or labels for what is on rows and columns. - Would like to have the ability to flatten-out the hierarchies. - The little checkmarks that appear when you select a member in the Select Members window are too hard to see. It is hard to quickly see what you have selected. - When removing an item from the query palate you have to drag it back to the Field List and not just outside the grid area. - Creating calculated members and calculated rows is not as intuitie as I would like.
Missing
- Export functionality Summary:
Looks like somebody is trying to get bought up by Microsoft! I can see this tool as a great replacement for e new MDX Builder that Microsoft just shipped with SQL 2005 and Office 2007. I think they may as well just write an Excel Add-in if they have not already. I think that it blows the official Microsoft MDX builder away but lacks the sophistication of the ProClarity interface/environment. The product contains some very cool features that are not available in any tools that I know about today. The main one that I am talking about is Asymmetric Queries (multiple sub queries on each, the rows and columns)... this feature along with Visual Totals go along way when trying to create a query and have non-standard requirements for the way the result set needs to look. The best tools on the market today lack the ability to do any great formating in my opinion. Overall, I think that it is a great beta version. I think that by providing the tool as a .NET control they have filled a much needed niche in the market for a strong MDX builder that can easily be embedded into custom applications. I can see this becoming a drag-and-drop control in Visual Studio like the Report Viewer control. June 01 Where Should You Create Your KPIs?Nick Barclay recently posted a good bit on KPI architecture in regards to the Microsoft BI platform. He goes over the different Microsoft KPI tools and some pros and cons of creating KPIs in each. KPIs in their pure defintion can be defined in almost any application that can handle data and calculations such as spreadsheet. There are also many applications that provide you with KPI features that allow you to define and work with KPIs. Hell, Microsoft alone has 3 different applications as Nick points out. This does not include the two options that ProClarity give you. You can create KPIs in ProClarity Professional (web and desktop)/PAS and in ProClarity Dashboard Server.
From a Microsoft prspective, I agree with Nick on BSM/PPS being the best overall solution for managing and displaying your KPIs. Microsoft has tried to align themselves and BSM/PPS with Kaplan and his Balanced Scorecard methodology and I think that they have done a decent job in doing that with BSM/PPS. KPIs & Scorecards are precisely what the software was meant to do after all. I think the best thing about BSM/PPS is that it provides more of a structure for your KPIs and allow you to use different data sources for you value, goal, and trends.
I do however, wish Microsoft would streamline the functionality a bit. They have always had a habbit of giving developers and user as many options as they can but this ultimatley means that a few of the options lack in functionality when compared to the others and some functionality is exclusive to a particular solution.
It is a good read, check it out.
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