I very power, and one of my favorite, PowerShell tools is released. I just saw tonight that PowerGUI has been released out of Beta http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/02/29/powergui-now-officially-released.aspx. I just downloaded it and installed it and so far so good. I’m currently working on a new PowerShell script for SharePoint Administrators. I’ll put out some more details as I get a little further into the project as I’m not sure exactly how (or if) it is going to work like I’m thinking it will. Stay tuned….
Ben Misc
I was recently made aware of the problem of SharePoint prompting user to install the ActiveX control name.dll on our public website, www.blue-granite.com, by one of our Microsoft contacts. It isn’t a problem as much as an annoyance to anyone visiting your site when they are prompted. Mossman has a nice fix for it here. While implementing the solution for ourselves as well as for some of our clients, we found the same “gothca” as Michael posted in the comments of this post: “make sure you place a reference on your master page to the init.js file and then declare your override after it, or moss will add a reference to the init.js after your override file and foil all your changes.”
Ben SharePoint
After converting SharePoint to Kerberos authentication the other week, my project for today was to get PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analysis working with Kerberos. My primary source for getting all the pieces correct with this TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb838775.aspx. However, one difference in my setup was that I run all of my SQL Services as a domain user. SQL Analysis Services by default runs as the network service. Go to Start -> Run -> services.msc. Change the SQL Analysis Services identity to the domain user you wish to run as. This also effects the commands posted on the TechNet site. Instead of
For Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, run the following command:
setspn –A MSOLAPSvc.3/<ServerName>.<Fully qualified domain name>
<ServerName>
setspn –A MSOLAPSvc.3/<ServerName>
<ServerName>
Run
For Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, run the following command:
setspn –A MSOLAPSvc.3/<ServerName>.<Fully qualified domain name>
<domain\username>
setspn –A MSOLAPSvc.3/<ServerName>
<domain\username>
on your AD Server. <ServerName> is the name of the Analysis Server your cube resides on that you wish to connect to when designing your dashboard. The other part that isn’t mentioned in the article as that all your application pools for PPS M&A must be running as the same user. In most cases they should all be setup this way already; however, if you are having problems authenticating to your PPS sites, this is one thing to check.
Once, you’ve made those changes, you should be able to open up your Dashboard Designer, connect to your Analysis Server running the cube you want to use and start designing!
Ben PerformancePoint
For those of you with MSDN subscriptions, Vista SP1 is here in the Top Subscriber Downloads. I downloaded it and installed it yesterday and so far so good. The only hitch was that it won’t upgrade the RC version of SP1, so I had to go into my Programs, view the updates, and remove SP1, after uninstalling SP1, the RTM version of it installed great, the evaluation version and build number disappeared from my desktop and everything seems to be running well. So far I don’t have any gripes about Vista other than the amount of resources it takes, but that’s easy to fix by just buying new/upgraded hardware and I’m always looking for reasons/excuses to do that. Hope you all are enjoying Vista as much as I am!
Ben Misc
I converted our SharePoint web applications from NTLM to Kerberos the other day. I still haven’t connected to an OLAP cube to test out the conversion, but after changing everything to Kerberos, the web applications are still working. To set up Kerberos the proper way I followed these two blog posts that are very helpful and step-by-step as to how to set it up. Props to Martin for his excellent post and direction on setting up Kerberos Authentication.
http://blogs.msdn.com/martinkearn/archive/2007/04/23/configuring-kerberos-for-sharepoint-2007-part-1-base-configuration-for-sharepoint.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/martinkearn/archive/2007/04/27/configuring-kerberos-for-sharepoint-2007-part-2-excel-services-and-sql-analysis-services.aspx
Ben SharePoint
My boss was currently made aware of an issue by some Microsoft folks and passed the information on to me. Apparently, when you create a public facing SharePoint site, when you are outside of your intranet, the site prompts you to install and ActiveX control, name.dll. The can be a turn off to visitors to your site and people become leery whenever they are prompted to install an ActiveX control they are unsure about or by a site the visit trying to learn more information. A fix for this issue is posted here: http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mossman/archive/2007/09/13/fixing-the-name-dll-activex-problem-the-mossman-way.aspx by MOSSMAN. I just implement it on our public site http://www.blue-granite.com and it worked great!
Ben SharePoint
My week of vacation is finishedL I’m sitting in Salt Lake City Airport right now waiting for my return flight. I had a great time Kansas City with my girlfriend and our friends there. The trip from Kansas City to Salt Lake City on Wednesday was a little adventurous as Chicago canceled 1000 flights causing a chain reaction that affected my flight to Salt Lake. I eventually made it to Utah around 1:30 am Thursday morning. Once there it was an amazing 3 days on the slopes of Park City. They had lots of fresh snow and some of the best skiing I have ever done. I made it through fairly injury free. I have a few sore ribs from a fantastic face plant and I hit one tree (it was soft and didn’t result in any injuries). Other than that I’m just a little sore. I realized how longs it’s been since I’ve skied that hard, that many days in a row. I think that is about all to report for now. Here are a couple pictures from the mountain. For more you can go to my pictures pages or few them all on my Windows Live Space at http://bstegink.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!ECE5F1634A75726A!232/. The long skinny one is a panoramic photo from the very top of the mountain. It appears a lot smaller than it is, if you download it, it is roughly 19,000 px by 1,000 px and it is a 360 degree view from the peak (about a 30 minute hike in ski boots from the highest chair). I create the panoramic photos using Windows Live Photo Gallery. It works great and makes creating panoramic photos easy and does an excellent job at it!
Ben Misc
That’s right, I’m off for a week of vacation. Tomorrow I fly out of Chicago to Kansas City, MO to spend 4 days with my girlfriend, some friends of ours and their son. It should be an amazing time and nice and relaxing. From there I fly out to Park City, Utah for 3 days on the slopes with some fellow WMU Computer Engineer graduates. It should be an amazing week. Hopefully I’ll come back with some good pictures that I’ll get up as soon as I can. I hope you all have a good week and I’ll be back blogging in a week.
Ben Misc
Alright, it’s time for a PerformancePoint point post, specifically, one aimed at the System Administrator who wished to monitor their network. A common misconception is that BI is for the CEO, CFO or other C-level executives who wish to see that status of the company in terms of dollars, budgets, sales, etc. However, a co-worker and I decided we needed to start designing a BI Solution for the IT worker who wants to monitor and analyze the details of his servers. Our solution is still in development and tweaking, but here is the beginning to our Server Cube and BI solution. A segment of our KPI list can be seen here:
The KPI list is generated from WMI queries that are then linked to a cube. Continued work is being done to gather even more relevant information from the queries to get a better view of your server status. This cube could also be custom developed if anyone had specific information they wanted in the cube, both from WMI queries as well as any other information from various sources. Once we have our cube and our KPIs, we linked them to our server “Strategy Map” seen below. We created our rack layout, created in Visio and linked the Server shapes to the KPIs for the various servers. As you can see we are still working on it as we cross domains and from our domain into the DMZ to monitor those servers.
So, as you can see, the PerformancePoint BI tool has many uses and isn’t contained to just the financial data that people tend to automatically associate with BI. I’ll continue to keep you all updated on the status of this project as we continue to improve it in our free time. Feel free to leave any comments on suggestions for improvement or any other ideas you may have.
Ben PerformancePoint, SharePoint