Yes, I’m straying back into BI a little bit due to this announcement by Microsoft. PerformancePoint is now include in the MOSS Enterprise CAL. So, for all of you that have SharePoint enterprise and wanted to add dashboards and BI to your SharePoint farm, this is your chance as you can now get PerformancePoint for no additional cost! This is an exciting move for Microsoft and one that I’m sure will excite a lot of SharePoint users and encourage the already quickly growing use of BI within organizations and companies across the globe.
The other day I was building a PerformancePoint development environment for a co-worker. When writing custom code to extend the functionality of PerformancePoint you either need to install Visual Studio 2005 along with the SDK, or you can just install Visual Studio 2008. I figured, why not just use Visual Studio 2008.
After installing SQL, MOSS, PerformancePoint and Visual Studio 2008, I handed over the development environment , within a few minutes my co-worker was telling me he was getting errors when trying to connect to the PerformancePoint web service. I dug into it and found that the web service as well as the Preview site, calls for System.Web.Extensions version 1.0.61231.0, while, in our GAC, we had System.Web.Extensions version 3.5.0.0. I opened up the web.config files and changed all reference from 1.0.61231.0 to 3.5.0.0. This seemed to work fine, I could get to the Preview Site and access the web service.
Once again I let my co-worker have a go at it. He got a little further this time and then tried to publish his dashboard, and once again got an error, this time it was in the dashboard page itself though. At this point in time, due to some time constraints, we decided to bag the idea of switching everything over to System.Web.Extensions 3.5.0.0, so I uninstalled the .NET 3.5 framework (that installs with Visual Studio 2008), copied the System.Web.Extension and System.Web.Extensions.Design 1.0.61231.0 files from another machine into the GAC on my develop machine and everything works fine now.
My last remaining curiosity is, if make sure I install the .NET 3.5 framework before I install PerformancePoint, will PerformancePoint pick up on the newer version of System.Web.Extensions? If anyone knows leave a comment, and if I find the answer or have time to go back and give it a trial myself, I’ll post the results.
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!
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.
The other day I was working with a client and had a new error come up that I hadn’t seen before when creating a new Shared Service. The error was Error Event 7888 and next to my Shared Service Provider in SharePoint is said, “Provisioning Failed: Windows NT user or group ‘somedomain.org\username’ not found. Check the name again”. After digging around and reading several other posts on the issue, I found what my problem was. Apparently, SharePoint doesn’t play well with the FQDN somedomain.org (or .com, .info, .local, etc). So everywhere an account that is needed for SharePoint is entered, it must simply be somedomain\username (without the .org).
The areas that I found needed to be changed were the following:
The overall admin account (application pool for Central Admin). This can be changed using the command stsadm.exe –o updatefarmcredentials
The next place it needs to be changed is the application pool identity for any of the web applications you have created. This MUST be done through central admin…changing them in the IIS settings will not work. They can be changed in Central Admin in the Operations Tab under the Security Configuration heading and then click Service Accounts. From here you can change the credentials for any of the Application Pool users that need to be changed.
One other place in SharePoint the username may need to be changed is under the Search setting. The location of this varies between WSSv3 and MOSS.
Finally, the last location to check for any usernames with the somedomain.org domain is within SQL and your login accounts within SQL. These should also be in the form of somedomain\username (without the .org).
Once all of this was done, my SSP properly provisioned, however, I was still getting Error Events 7888 in the event viewer. To eliminate these errors from occurring every minute, I had to delete the SSP and recreate it and everything worked fine. The only other “hitch” was deleting the SSP since it was my only one. It is possible to delete it using stsadm.exe –o deletessp. After you run it you will get an error, simply run the exact same command a second time and your SSP will be deleted. You should be all set to create a new SSP without any errors.
If I’ve forgotten any places where the users need to be changed or anything else relating to this error, feel free to let me know or post a comment.
Finally!! Last night I downloaded my copy of PerformancePoint from MSDN. I’ve been working with a client all day and have work with them all day tomorrow implamenting SharePont, so unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to install it yet. I also have other client engagements the beginning of next week, so hopefully this weekend or middle of the week next week I can get it installed and start playing.
The PerformancePoint RTM Evaluation version is available! Both the 32-bit version, download here, and the 64-bit version, download here, are available as a free download. In addition Microsoft has released some sample data as well as a hotfix for PerforancePoint to interact with ProClarity Analytics Server. I am still waiting for PerformacePoint to be released on MSDN as well as if the evaluation can be upgraded to a licensed version once it becomes available. I’ll continue to post as information becomes available. The latest I have seen is that it will be available on MSDN in “very early October”.
The other day I ran into a problem with email enabled lists in SharePoint. I set up SharePoint to allow incoming email. The company wanted the email in SharePoint to have the same domain as the rest of the email address for the company. We used SharePoint Directory Management Service and created a new OU to store all the email contacts. We set up the SMTP server name to be the SharePoint SMTP server and set the display address to be the companies email. However, when the user is created, the primary email address’s domain is the name of the SMTP server. This causes a problem in that AD won’t assign the company email domain to the contact using the recipient policies because it is the primary email in the recipient policy, which wouldn’t assign two primary email addresses to the contact. To solve the problem I wrote a simple PowerShell script to look at all the users and assign the email address to all the contacts in the OU that didn’t already have an email address of the set domain. The beginning of the script will allow you to set the domain, OU and domain of the email. You can either run the script manually whenever you want, or set it to run as a scheduled task.You also don’t need to run the script on your Exchange Server, or even have PowerShell running on your Exchange server, you can run it from whatever computer you wish as long as it has PowerShell installed and has access to write to the users in the OU on the Exchange Server. I ran it from my 64 bit Vista Machine without and problems.You can download the script here.
As of tonight PerformancePoint CTP4 is officially available on Microsoft Connect. I’m in the process of downloading it right now and hope to have the bits installed on a test server tomorrow morning.