Chris Webb's BI Blog: Client Tools

nextanalytics

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:28:18 GMT

Hands up who remembers OLAP@Work? If you do you've been working with Analysis Services for a long time, back when it was still OLAP Services... for those of you who don't, it was one of about four options you had if you wanted a client tool circa 1999; it was an Excel addin and it was pretty good. Anyway, I've just seen this article on Intelligent Enterprise on what Ward Yaternick, the guy who founded OLAP@Work, has been up to since leaving Business Objects (which bought and eventually killed OLAP@Work):
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2008/06/bi_innovation_f.html

He's been working on something called nextanalytics:
http://www.nextanalytics.com/

Poking around on the site it looks quite interesting; certainly there are lots of mentions of MDX so I guess it supports Analysis Services as a data source (although it supports a lot of other data sources too). The key thing is that it allows you to create complex queries and calculations using a scripting language. Clearly this scripting language allows you to do the same kind of things you can do with MDX and indeed one particular entry on the nextanalytics blog caught my eye:
http://www.nextanalytics.com/component/option,com_myblog/Itemid,342/show,Can-a-business-intelligence-product-be-used-to-answer-analytic-questions-.html/

I was about to leave a comment when I saw that Mosha had beaten me to it. Mosha's right that contrary to what the original entry says, what Ward is describing is certainly possible in MDX, but Ward also has a point that it's not something that someone with an average knowledge of MDX could accomplish. Can nextanalytics prove itself to be easier to use than MDX? Time will tell. I'll have to download the open source version of it (available here: http://www.codeplex.com/nextanalyticsOS) to try it out. When I have a spare moment, of course, which at the current rate is going to be some time next year.

Excel 2007 Workarounds

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:52:49 GMT

Interesting post here from Allan Folting on the Excel blog discussing some workarounds for common problems that arise when using Excel 2007 as a client tool for AS2005:

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2008/02/05/common-questions-around-excel-2007-OLAP-PivotTables.aspx

It explains why you can't select individual calculated members on non-measures dimensions, which in my opinion is the biggest barrier for the use of Excel 2007 as a front end because it effectively rules out the use of time utility dimensions. The workaround discussed is to use an older version of the pivot table but you lose as much as you gain from doing this; luckily a 'future solution' is promised. I guess this will come in a future service pack for Excel because apparently (changing the subject slightly) we're not getting a SP3 since not enough people have asked for it (see here for more details). Pretty stupid, eh? Esepcially given the fact that SP2 was a bit of a disaster from an Analysis Services point of view with a whole load of bugs and performance regressions appearing. If you'd like to see a SP3 then vote here on Connect:

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=326575

Last of all, talking of Excel 2007 BI, it seems like you can now put Excel directly on top of SAP Netweaver BI:

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/8483

Good from the point of view of industry-wide support for MDX, I suppose, but on the other hand it does eat away at one of the unique selling points of the MS BI stack.

Panorama: One Year On

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:48:36 GMT

After the Proclarity acquisition last year many people, myself included, thought the writing was on the wall for Panorama: after all the two companies' product lines were very similar and if Proclarity was going to be supplied by Microsoft then there wasn't going to be much point in looking at Panorama any more. However, one of the things that surprised me at the Microsoft BI Conference a few months back was the big display that Panorama put on. A big stand in a central location with leggy girls luring the attendees (at least the male ones) to it, a party at the top of the Space Needle - this was a company that was not dead, or at least making a pretty big effort to show that it wasn't dead.

Of course the real test is whether the software is any good or not. In keeping with their bullish mood Panorama were handing out DVDs with their Novaview suite pre-installed on a virtual machine (you can download it here: http://challenge.panorama.com/forms/default.aspx) and since it was a while since I'd last seen what they'd got to offer (and after some encouragement from their marketing department) I was curious to check it out. After a lot of false starts surrounding licence keys etc and help from Panorama - and I have to say that in my experience their pre-sales support has always been very good - I got it running on my laptop and thought I'd share my impressions here.

I have to admit I was disappointed with the Novaview Desktop tool at first: it didn't look as if anything had changed in the last few years. The UI looks very outdated in a VB6 way and while it's easier to use than I remember, I'm still not convinced that it's as intuitive as it should be. Even worse, within a few minutes of using it I got one of those unhandled (although unfatal) error messages that Panorama was always famous for - which simply isn't acceptable today. These might be purely cosmetic points but users are more interested in this type of thing than some obscure aspect of MDX generation. After a bit more time though I felt more positive. For the power user it does pretty much everything that you'd ever want it to do, such as enter your own MDX, do writeback, advanced filtering, creating calculations; in fact it clearly does what every demanding customer has ever wanted it to do so it's more than likely able to meet any obscure querying requirements you have.

I took my misgivings back to Panorama and they told me that the desktop client will be dropped in the next release, due Q1 2008, and from that point there will only be an AJAX-based zero-footprint client and a rich client based on Adobe Flex. It's interesting that the latter is not based on .NET or even Silverlight; not only a move away from the desktop, which is only to be expected, but a move away from the Microsoft dev platform which I suppose makes sense given Panorama's repositioning of itself away from being a purely Microsoft partner to working with SAP as well. Presumably it will have much the same capabilities as the current desktop client but look rather better...

In the meantime, the comparison between Novaview Desktop and ProClarity Desktop is one that has been made a lot in the past and is probably worth making again. In terms of querying functionality they're neck-and-neck but in my opinion Proclarity is easier to use and looks marginally better, although it is still falls way short of what I'd expect from a modern BI tool. The problem with the Proclarity Desktop tool is that is has it has been declared dead by Microsoft: the last official release was made late last year and it seems there's no place for a rich client in the bright shiny web-enabled PerformancePoint future. I've heard various rumours about it such as that it was going to be turned into an Excel addin or, more recently that it was going to be rewritten in .NET, but that lack of any clear direction from Microsoft on its future is a bit frustrating. I suspect that Microsoft have decided that Excel is the only desktop tool anyone is going to need, but I think there's still a role for a dedicated client for power users and I know a lot of other Proclarity users feel the same way. If you're in the market for a full-featured AS desktop tool then there's little point in going with Proclarity Desktop now, so Novaview wins by default given that there's a clear roadmap for its future.

As far as the web-based querying and dashboarding functionality goes there is clear competition with what Panorama and PerformancePoint have to offer. A lot of companies will simply go with the Microsoft offering simply because it's from Microsoft, and that's a perfectly valid decision; anyway, given the lineage of the product it's going to be a lot better than a typical Microsoft version 1.0. Why choose Panorama then? Panorama claim to be a lot more scaleable on the web than the old Proclarity equivalents; it's probably too early to tell whether the same will be true of PerformancePoint though. The cross-platform capabilities will probably be the key: from what I've seen in my Analysis Services consultancy work, a lot of companies using AS also use SAP BW and a common front-end for both could be an enticing prospect. I'm also told that Panorama will be building functionality behind PerformancePoint to enable import of data from other platforms and in front of it to enable integration with other applications and business processes - the kind of value-add stuff that Microsoft can't offer because of its longer release cycles and limitations on who they can partner with.

So, it looks like Panorama have got a future after all. Just as the Microsoft's entry into the OLAP server market didn't lead to the immediate bloodbath among rival OLAP vendors that many predicted, so its entry into the client tool market hasn't (yet) killed off the old third-party client tools market. The delay in getting PerformancePoint released after the Proclarity acquisition and the fact that most companies are a long way from rolling Office 2007 onto their desktops means that companies like Panorama have had a chance to work out a survival strategy - and the choice this means can only be a good thing for us end users.

Resurrect the XMLA Council!

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:46:08 GMT

A few weeks ago I had an interesting email conversation with Nick Goodman and Julian Hyde after Nick noticed that the XMLA Council's web site which used to be at www.xmla.org now redirects to a site 'brought to you by Simba Technologies'. Now I have nothing against Simba - in fact they have a number of interesting products - but the lack of an independent web site highlights the fact that the XMLA Council is in effect dead, having not met (so I understand) for several years now. A few days later I saw Andrew Wiles had blogged on this topic too:
http://andrewwiles.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!43141EE7B38A8A7A!199.entry

As Andrew points out, at present XMLA interoperability is something of a myth. There are a few tools that do manage it such as Rex which, unlike Mosha, I was able to use successfully against AS2005 as well as Mondrian although it's probably not worth the bother (it's nowhere near as good as SQL Management Studio for running MDX queries). JPivot is another open source tool that claims to work against AS and Mondrian but although I know other people have got it working against AS2K (see for example here: http://forums.pentaho.org/showthread.php?t=49954) and AS2005 I've never been able to do so against AS2005 despite several hours of effort. The only commercial product that works against multiple platforms that I've had experience of is Panorama (though I know there are others out there), and as this blog entry suggests it's been a hard slog for them to work with SAP's bizarre implementation of MDX.

I guess what happened with the XMLA Council is that like a lot of initiatives like this there was an initial burst of enthusiasm that dissipated once its ideals came into conflict with the demands of real-world product development. I know it's pie-in-the-sky to expect perfect cross-platform interoperability but I think the present situation could be made a lot better and I think the time has come to resurrect the XMLA Council - and I think it's up to Microsoft to take the lead on this. I don't want to suggest that Microsoft have some kind of moral obligation to do this as de facto owners of the spec, rather that while everyone would benefit from increased interoperability Microsoft would benefit most. The first reason why is that the XMLA-compatible client tool market is dominated by tools that work against AS and which are sold by Microsoft partners, and they would be able to expand their potential customer base to support other servers like SAP BW and Essbase. More importantly though, the client tool that everyone really wants to use is Excel and if it were possible to hook Excel 2007 up to other OLAP engines then it would cement its position as the BI client tool of choice. Reporting Services' support for SAP BW and Essbase shows that Microsoft are interested in supporting competing OLAP tools so is it unrealistic to expect Excel could support the same platforms?

Intelligencia OLAP Controls

Fri, 25 May 2007 09:47:56 GMT

Andrew Wiles announced yesterday the availability of a beta version of his new MDX query builder component, 'Intelligencia OLAP Controls':

http://andrewwiles.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!43141EE7B38A8A7A!168.entry

I had a quick demo of it this morning and I was very impressed. It has some really quite clever ideas in it such as the spreadsheet-based calculation functionality, and while it doesn't do absolutely everything I'd like (it is still a beta, after all) it does an awful lot and Andrew is very open to feedback for what needs to be added. If you're interested in checking it out you can download it here:

http://www.it-workplace.co.uk/

The product is aimed at ISVs, in-house developers and consultants who want to incorporate MDX querying functionality in their own products. I'll be blunt: the company that really should be looking at this, and perhaps licensing it for use in Katmai and/or future versions of Office, is Microsoft. The control's Office 2007 look-and-feel gives a tantalising glimpse of what a power user would want to see in Excel when connecting to AS and it puts the Reporting Services MDX query builder to shame.

DS Panel

Tue, 08 May 2007 23:17:04 GMT

It's Day 0 of the BI Conference, I haven't even registered and I'm already busy... This morning I went to a presentation by DS Panel (the guys who brought you the Santa Dashboard a few months back). They've been around in the Microsoft BI world a long time but for some reason I'd never seen their stuff so I was curious to check it out.

Now the question that I've been asking all third-party tool vendors, and which I'm sure all prospective customers are asking too, is why should I buy from you when PerformancePoint is just around the corner? For DS Panel and others about 80% of what they do is what all AS client tools do and certainly what PerformancePoint is going to do, so it's the details, the unique features and the quality of execution that's important. DS Panel have a new release of their core dashboarding product, DSP Performance Canvas (see http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/05/prweb524461.htm for the press release, http://www.dspanel.com for the company home page) and it certainly looks pretty and seems easy to use; their use of AJAX means it's extremely responsive for a web app too. What caught my eye was their integration with various enterprise search engines, something I blogged about a while ago although I'm a bit more positive about the idea than I was then. They also have a cool solution for dashboarding on mobile devices, which I've not seen anyone else do, and where their use of sparklines is really effective; and a few other nice features such as the ability to add annotations to specific slices of data. Overall definitely worth checking out if you're in the market for a dashboard application, need easy Sharepoint integration, and can't wait for PerformancePoint to be released or reach a useable level of maturity.

Hmm, now time for me to go over to the conference centre and register. There will be a lot more blogging to come over the next few days: more product reviews, reports of presentations and maybe even another podcast!

Silverlight

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 08:55:39 GMT

Reading all the fuss about the Silverlight announcement (see http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/apr07/04-15WPFEPR.mspx) makes me wonder how long it's going to be before we have a Microsoft BI client tool that makes use of it. I'm seeing more and more of Crystal Xcelsius in the marketplace (which is based on Flash, which Silverlight is competing with) and business people seem to be very impressed with some of the wizzy animations you can do with it - see, for example, Janne Pyykkö's demo here http://jpbi.blogspot.com/2007/04/crystal-xcelcius-playful-3d-demo.html. Surely it can only be a matter of time...?

UPDATE: James Wakefield has just sent me this link to an article he wrote on hooking Xcelsius up to any XMLA compliant OLAP database:

http://www.bobjects.com/email_imp/partners/nl_xcelsius/article5.html

White Paper on Designing Cubes for Excel 2007

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:14:37 GMT

There's a new white paper available on designing cubes for use with Excel 2007:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2D779CD5-EEB2-43E9-BDFA-641ED89EDB6C&displaylang=en

Microcharts 1.1

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:54:16 GMT

I blogged about Microcharts last year, but I've just heard that version 1.1 has been released and one of the new features is the ability to use them in server-based reporting tools like Reporting Services, as well as in Excel. Take a look at the following two videos which showcase the products:

http://www.bonavistasystems.com/Media/MicroCharts%20Demo/MicroCharts%20Demo.html (client)
http://www.bonavistasystems.com/Media/MicroCharts%20Server%20Components/MicroCharts%20Server%20Components.html (technical)

There's also a good article on building a dashboard on Adventure Works in Excel 2007 that has some good examples of how to use the new AS cube spreadsheet functions like CubeMember:

http://www.bonavistasystems.com/Articles_DashboardsWithExcel2007.html

I see Nick Barclay has already worked out how to use them in PerformancePoint scorecards:

http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/2007/02/pps-bsm-sparklines-in-scorecards.html

Before we get all excited about Excel 2007 as a client tool, I thought I'd also point out this recent post from Marco Russo highlighting a massive drawback with using it on cubes that have time utility dimensions:

http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/sqlbi/archive/2007/01/31/27461.aspx

What an absolute howler, especially given that I remember Excel 2000 had the same problem and it got fixed in a later release (either XP or 2003) after a lot of complaining. Top priority for SP1 please!

Performance Management Early Start Initiative

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:19:55 GMT

Again via Ben Tamblyn, news of the Performance Management 'Early Start' programme for partners:

http://blogs.msdn.com/btamblyn/archive/2007/01/03/performance-management-training-and-enablement-quickstart-programme.aspx

You can sign up for it here:

https://partner.microsoft.com/40029078

...and download other useful stuff to do with PerformancePoint etc.

Fractal:Edge

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:56:31 GMT

Adding to the list of cool new visualisation tools that you can put on top of Analysis Services (or at least data sourced from AS), take a look at Fractal:Edge:

http://www.fractaledge.com/

Very cool... must take a closer look when I have a spare moment.

PerformancePoint news

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 06:30:14 GMT

Charlie Maitland has two good posts on PerformancePoint server:

http://charliem.wordpress.com/2006/10/03/performancepoint-biz-is-coming/

http://charliem.wordpress.com/2006/10/04/notes-from-the-microsoft-partner-bi-bootcamp/

I know, I'm a bit late in linking here but I was away last week... which was also the reason why I couldn't go to the bootcamp that Charlie was at. Hohum.

PerformancePoint TAP

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 06:55:26 GMT

Darren Gosbell has just told me that the application form for the PerformancePoint Server TAP is available at Microsoft Connect:

http://connect.microsoft.com/

At the time of writing, I can see a link to the form from the front page of Connect, but if that goes away in the near future then you will probably need to sign in and go to 'Available Connections'.

Microcharts

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:23:12 GMT

Data visualisation is definitely this year's hot topic in BI: I've already blogged about how much I like Tableau (though they seem to be pretty much in bed with Hyperion now), and now here come Microcharts - another cool way of looking at your Analysis Services data:

http://www.bonavistasystems.com/

Take a look at the online gallery:

http://www.bonavistasystems.com/OnlineDemoReports.html

To be honest I'd never heard of sparklines and so on before I saw an early beta of this stuff, but I'm definitely a convert now and with the focus on Microsoft BI now switching heavily to Excel with Office 2007 this is a timely release.

More on Visio 12 as an AS Client

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 07:35:40 GMT

At the end of last year I linked to a post on Nick Barclay's blog entitled "Don't forget about Visio for BI":

http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/2005/12/office-12-dont-forget-about-visio-for.html

...which highlighted some of the features coming in Visio 2007 for BI. I naturally then forgot all about Visio for BI until I saw the following post on Mauro Cardarelli's blog:

http://blogs.officezealot.com/mauro/archive/2006/08/05/12052.aspx

Apart from an online course on what's new in Visio 2007 (https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerContent.aspx?offerPriceId=99493) he also points back to Eric Rockey's Visio 2007 blog, which is definitely checking out again, especially this post on PivotDiagrams:

http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_rockey/archive/2006/02/25/538996.aspx#comments

There are some interesting points raised in the comments section on whether this stuff could be integrated with Reporting Services; I agree that while these capabilities are very cool, just having them in Visio is a bit of a waste. Perhaps this is a case where a Reporting Services Custom Report Item could be written (see ms-help://MS.SQLCC.v9/MS.SQLSVR.v9.en/rptsprg9/html/402910f7-7e45-4e22-8182-fb58a96bfec0.htm ) but I'm not sure you'd want to use Visio on a server in this way. For further reading, there is even more information on PivotDiagrams on Bill Morein's blog here:

https://blogs.msdn.com/wmorein/

So, farewell then Office Web Components

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 21:36:56 GMT

I heard a few months ago that Office Web Components were not going to be included in Office 2007 and wouldn't be developed any further; here at last is the official confirmation from the Excel 2007 blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/07/17/668544.aspx

We're meant to use Excel Services or Excel instead - and I'm sure that you'll probably agree that neither of these are ideal (unless you've drunk the Office 2007 Kool-aid) replacements for scenarios where people have been using OWC to connect to Analysis Services. For instance, how would you replace OWC in BI Development Studio with either Excel or Excel Services? What we really need are a set of .Net pivot table controls similar to CellsetGrid or the Dundas equivalents. I feel a Connect coming on...

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=165284

UPDATE: I just read the following interview with Alex Payne on www.tdwi.org:

http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8077

I quote: "[So one of] the things we’re going to do is make the ProClarity objects be able to be used by more people than ever before….When I look at things like decomposition trees and perspective and other things they have in their arsenal, we’re going to use that stuff to help us go deeper. " Perhaps we'll see the Proclarity controls positioned as the OWC/AS replacement?

What Panorama Did Next (Part 72)

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 06:12:58 GMT

I've been quite interested to watch what Panorama have been up to since the Proclarity acquisition, as I'm sure all you Panorama customers out there have been. Two new press releases have caught my eye, firstly:

http://www.pansw.com/pdf/062006_Office_SAP_Pan.pdf

It's not clear to me exactly what's being announced here. Are they talking about being able to use the new features in Excel 2007 pivot tables etc for querying BW directly, or are they building an AS2005 cube somewhere in there in between? Or are they using their own Excel addin to query BW and not using the new Excel pivot tables at all?

Secondly there's this:

http://www.pansw.com/pdf/062106_Panorama_Google.pdf

Integration with Google spreadsheets? Hmm, might be useful if Google spreadsheets ever come out of beta. How long have Google Groups been out? A good few years and I see it's still supposedly in beta. I can't see anyone wanting to buy or use this functionality for a while, so why build and announce it? Maybe by flirting with Google they're trying to send MS a message...

Panorama Industry-Specific Solutions

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 11:20:02 GMT

A lot of people, me included, have been wondering what the future holds for Panorama after the Proclarity acquistion. Well it looks like Microsoft have tried to make amends in the form of a partnership to develop industry-specific BI applications:

http://www.pansw.com/pdf/060706_Panorama_MSFT.pdf

There'll be solutions for retail, credit management, manufacturing and other areas. Quite apart from the fact that the new apps will be nice to have, I'm glad that Panorama hasn't been left to sink - it has some good products and the diversity of the MS BI client tool ecosystem has always been one of its strengths in my opinion, so anything that Microsoft can do to maintain that diversity should be welcomed.

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 12:43:48 GMT

So Biz# gets a proper name at last...

There's a conf call (which I don't have an invite to, alas) later to announce all this stuff properly, but here are some links to press coverage:

http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+bulk+up+Office+business+intelligence/2100-1012_3-6080217.html

http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=21772

UPDATE: I missed the conf call (even though I found I didn't need an invite - prior commitments I'm afraid) but there are already some good blog entries out there on what was announced:

http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/rogers/archives/2006/06/microsoft_busin.php

http://www.chrisbrandsma.com/2006/06/biz-office-performancepoint-server.html

http://spaces.msn.com/iantien/Blog/cns!749F6111096DD58C!650.entry

and here's the official site:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX101550371033.aspx

Office Ultimate

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 20:36:53 GMT

I'm sure you all know by now that I'm prone to the odd bout of wild speculation, and here comes another one... A new flavour of Office has been announced, Office Ultimate. See

http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/015758.html

for more details. As this article says, it's pricey and MS will need to offer new functionality to justify that price tag. Now we know that it's the Office group that have bought Proclarity and what I'm thinking is that the Proclarity fat client tool would fit nicely into Office Ultimate as exactlly that kind of justification: $679 per licence is cheap when you think of what companies have been paying for BI client tools like Proclarity up to now (and you get Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc thrown in!), plus its inclusion will drive sales of SQL Server and the other Office BI apps like BSM and (perhaps) the forthcoming Biz#. Hmm... let's wait and see...

Microsoft buys Proclarity

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 11:46:15 GMT

This is all over the blogs today, and with good reason: it's the biggest news in the Microsoft BI world since, well, the release of OLAP Services. Here's the press release:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/apr06/04-03ProClarityPR.mspx

Now, why has this happened, what does it mean and is it a good thing? Well, the first question is fairly easy to answer. Microsoft has for a long time suffered from not having a complete set of tools when it comes to BI: customers had to buy their server from one place (Microsoft, a big, fairly well trusted company) but unless they were willing to use Excel pivot tables (and few were) then got told to go and look at all the other client tools on the market which meant another round of evaluations, another swarm of salesmen to talk to and significant extra expense. It didn't help that all these other client tool companies were relatively small and unknown and their products were, let's face it, sometimes lacking in terms of quality and finesse. Certainly some companies appreciated having a choice, but in my experience the majority, especially the enterprise customers, didn't. So as a result companies like Cognos and Microstrategy benefitted from being seen as the 'one stop shop' for BI solutions.

This situation was the result of a professed strategy by Microsoft to deliberately stay out of the client tools market. The thinking was that Excel and the other MS client tools would take the low-hanging fruit and leave the rest of the business to third parties like Proclarity; competition between these third parties would stimulate innovation and provide the customer with choice. In my opinion though this innovation didn't really appear and the only choice the customer got was between similar tools, so that and the point I made in the previous paragraph about customers having to buy from two vendors is I think why this strategy got dumped. Interestingly, I heard from a Proclarity guy ages ago that MS tried to buy them in 2001 but Proclarity turned them down (MS going on to buy what became Data Analyzer instead); I would imagine that Proclarity changed their mind about being bought when they realised that the new functionality in Office 12 would mean that Microsoft would not only be taking the low-hanging fruit but just about everything edible on the lower-half of the tree, so providing much stiffer competition.

Is this a good thing then? For Microsoft and for its customers, yes. Proclarity is a good tool - I was impressed with what I saw of its latest release when I saw it a few months ago, and it seemed to be the tool on the market that took greatest advantage of the new features of AS2005. It also provides much needed infrastructure which now, presumably, will be much more closely integrated with the rest of Microsoft's tool suite; I would guess that Microsoft will be investing even more in development to make the tool even better. It will be interesting to see what happens with pricing too - I would guess that licence costs will go down, with the obvious effect of making the Microsoft BI suite even more attractive on that front.

Of course there are going to be some losers in this situation, and in this case its all the other third party tool vendors. Panorama especially seem to be screwed - why buy their stuff when you can buy the equivalent tools directy from Microsoft? I can see that if the integration of Proclarity into Microsoft takes a long time, or if the integration of Proclarity tools with other Microsoft tools is too tight (eg if customers don't use Sharepoint, or are unwilling to upgrade to Office 12, then they can't use the other MS BI tools) then there might be some short-term opportunity for them, but in the long run I can't imagine they'll prosper. Then there are all the much smaller tool vendors, who carved out niches based on price or specialist functionality or who were tied to consultancies: times will be much harder for them now they're seen as being in direct competition with Microsoft and their cost advantage is eroded, and many of them will disappear too. Listen out for the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the partner community over the next few months... the comments on Mosha's blog entry about this are only a start:

http://www.sqljunkies.com/WebLog/mosha/archive/2006/04/03/microsoft_acquires_proclarity.aspx

It seems a shame that this is happening but at the end of the day Microsoft's first and only priority is its bottom line and its customers, and as I've said from that point of view this is the right move.

New version of the Microsoft Excel Addin

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 13:07:52 GMT

Marco Russo notes that a new version of the Microsoft Excel Addin has been released which supports AS2005:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=DAE82128-9F21-475D-88A4-4B6E6C069FF0&displaylang=en

(Teo Lachev also comments on this here; I agree with what he says about OWC, and I'm trying to find out whether there will be an OWC in Office 12)

It's a pleasant surprise that Microsoft have actually released another version of this addin, given that they're now hard at work at integrating its features into Excel 12. I didn't notice much that was different apart from the AS2005 support though.

However, if I can be permitted one small moan, I did spot a problem that I've seen in other AS2005-enabled clients and which I hope won't turn into a trend. I found it by creating a report using Adventure Works, putting the measure [Internet Sales Amount] on columns and trying to put something from the Geography dimension on pages, which resulted in a dialog box informing me that the Geography dimension was unrelated to the [Internet Sales] measure group and stopping me from completing the operation. Now in 99% of cubes this would be a good thing to do, but I've already built a few cubes where I have dimensions that have no relation to any measure group but where selections on them do impact calculations (think solving the start/end date problem, where you might want to create an end date dimension with no relation to a measure group); of course, this client feature stops you from being able to design cubes in this way. It's a case of the designers of the tool being a little bit too helpful... and it would be good to be able to turn this behaviour off in the Options dialog.

Excel 12 BI first impressions

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 16:23:46 GMT

After my gushing posts about Excel 12 BI a month or so ago, I was co-opted onto the Office 12 beta program with the invitation to blog all I want about it. So... having downloaded the beta bits and installed them, here's the first in a series of posts on my experiences with Excel 12. I suppose this makes me a willing tool of the evil Microsoft hype machine (maybe if I blogged about games consoles, exotic holidays or stock tips people would try to bribe me with something better than beta testing) but hey, I'm sure you've already worked out that I sold my soul to billg several years back!

My first pleasant surprise came with the installation - it was freakishly fast. Having wasted hours installing various versions of SQL2005 on my machine over the last year or so, Office 12 seemed to install in about 5 minutes. Opening Excel it wasn't hard to get to grips with the new interface and I could appreciate the benefits: it's a lot more visual, and not having to make your way through several levels of nested menu items does make it faster to use.

Creating a connection to a cube was pretty easy, much better than the wizard of previous versions, and I created a pivot table. Then came my first disappointment. As with the pivot tables we're all familiar with, Measures are treated as a special case and can only be dragged into a 'Values' region on the pivot table rather than put on Rows or Columns directly. After a bit of searching I came across a property which let me move my measures to where I wanted them, but I really don't understand why this is so difficult; no other AS client tool has this problem. Similarly, when selecting members you're still only given the option to view a hierarchy as a treeview starting at the All Member and then drilling down to the members below; most, if not all other AS client tools (including SQL Management Studio and BI Dev Studio) also give you the option to see a treeview consisting of the levels of each hierarchy, so you can either select a whole level or expand it and select members from it. Admittedly in AS2005 the fact that you'll have lots of single level attribute hierarchies in your cube makes this slightly less of an inconvenience, but it's still pretty irritating, and a bit of a step backwards from the functionality offered in Microsoft's existing Excel addin.

However, once I'd run my first query there was a whole load of good new functionality to enjoy. For example, under Field Settings/Show Data As, you can switch between showing the actual values of your measure and various calculated values such as percentage of column - meeting a very common requirement and one which MDX can't handle well, as this recent newsgroup thread shows. Displaying member property values is handled nicely, and the filtering/sorting functionality available on member names, member property values and measure values is very good indeed - possibly better than in any other AS client tool I've come across - although I didn't seem to be able to filter on the values displayed using 'Show Data As', only the real values. Then there's the formatting functionality, already well covered in the Excel 12 blog and again very good indeed. Query performance seemed ok, in fact better than some other client tools on my test cube, and browsing hierarchies with large numbers of members was not a problem.

Like other Excel addins for AS, you can also convert your pivot tables into a set of formulas which return member names and values. I don't have an installation of the existing Excel addin handy, but from what I remember there are several important improvements here: you can now use formulas to construct the parameters you pass into these functions, eg such as =CUBEMEMBER("localhost MyDB","[Product].[MyUserHierarchy].[Category].&[" & H12 & "]"); there are also some new functions which allow you to declare named sets using whatever MDX you like and then pick members out of them, so that these members can then be passed into the other functions.

Obviously this being beta 1 there were some things that didn't work. I don't know whether it was because I had to install Excel on a Windows 2003 box and work via Remote Desktop Connection, but the charts looked like they'd been generated on a ZX Spectrum. There were also rather interesting Group/Ungroup buttons which didn't work... I wonder if they are for creating custom groups of members? Overall though, the build seemed stable and the BI features worked well.

What next? I need to download and install the documentation (!) and Excel Services so I can check out how easy it is to create BI dashboards for the intranet. This post was only intended to convey my first impressions so as I learn more I'll make sure I blog about it, and if I've said anything so far which is wrong or inaccurate (which is certainly possible) I'll be happy to issue a correction. If anyone has any BI-related Excel client features they'd like me to check out then please leave a comment and I'll do my best to oblige. I'm impressed with what I've seen so far; maybe the BI community can exert a bit of people power and lobby to get the less good features changed, so that Excel 12 fulfills its promise.

More on Excel Services

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 10:57:01 GMT

Two more entries on the Excel 12 blog about Excel Services:

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/11/08/490502.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/11/09/490926.aspx

As I've probably said far too many times already, the BI dashboarding stuff is going to be very, very important if it lives up to the hype...

Even more Excel BI stuff

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 14:44:28 GMT

After my last post earlier today, I came across a whole heap of new links I thought I should share. First of all, here's the press release on new Office BI functionality, which includes a few screenshots:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/oct05/10-23BiLaunchPR.mspx

Unfortunately I couldn't get into the LiveMeeting recording that it links to. Here's more reaction:

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/10/24/484389.aspx

http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/011461.html

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5907375.html

Most important of all, though, the video of the PDC presentation on Excel BI is now available to download at

http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/

Look for the following presentation:

OFF323: Building Business Intelligence Solutions Using “Excel 12” and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services

I've just watched it and wow, it really looks like Excel 12 lives up to the hype. In fact there's nothing that it's doing that plenty of other tools haven't done for ages, but this is EXCEL. And there are many pleasing touches such as the date filtering and all of the new formatting functionality that Excel 12 gives you. Now all Microsoft need to do is buy Tableau and incorporate their visualisation capabilities into Excel and you will have the killer BI app.

And continuing the train of thought about Excel Services (as I should be calling Excel server) and AS, it also struck me that there's a certain overlap between it and Reporting Services too, at least as far as intranet reporting goes. Why go to the trouble of creating an RS report when you can simply push your spreadsheet up to Sharepoint and see it in the Excel Services thin client? Obviously you can't do this for all the scenarios you need to use RS for, but hmm, I wonder if you can build a custom data extension so you can point RS at an instance of Excel Services and grab data from a spreadsheet for your RS reports...

Tableau v1.5 released

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:52:50 GMT

Version 1.5 of Tableau, in my opinion probably the best looking, easiest to use and most innovative (but unfortunately also rather expensive and fat-client only) AS client tool has just been released. You can see a list of all the new features here, chief of which is support for AS2005. If you're looking for an AS client tool I strongly recommend you download a trial and take a look even if you don't think it can meet all your requirements - it really shows up how poor the other client tools out there are in user interface terms.

I did a tiny bit of beta testing on this release and remained as impressed as I was when I first saw it. However the discovery that you can't use Time Utility dimensions with the tool - a modelling technique which is going to be very common with AS2005 since that's what the Time Intelligence Wizard builds to hang all your time calculations such as YTD and Previous Period Growth off - was a bit of a disappointment. I found the dev team very intelligent and responsive to feedback, though, and they've promised to look at this problem for the next release...

Dundas OLAP Services

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 11:01:34 GMT

I see that Dundas have entered the market for ADOMD and ADOMD.Net client components with Dundas OLAP Services. It's available in Windows Forms and ASP.Net flavours and although it doesn't offer anything much in terms of functionality that isn't already available, I'll be taking a look because a) the web component looks prettier than most of the competition, which isn't hard, and b) it's from Dundas rather than a one-man-and-a-dog software company, so there's less risk about future support.

UPDATE: you can see a live demo on Foodmart 2000 here. Having looked at it briefly, it's as I thought - does nothing new, but those charts are nice to look at.

Tableau

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 13:48:33 GMT

I have to admit that as far as the market for client tools for Analysis Services went, I thought I'd seen it all. Now that Proclarity et al are relatively mature, who would want to challenge them? And if someone was going to launch a new tool, they'd need a new usp - and after the glut of tools that did cell-by-cell analysis in Excel (eg Intelligentapps, MIS Plain) that came along a few years ago I didn't think there were any new usps left. Well, a new client called Tableau has come along to change my mind...

My interest was aroused by this article by Stephen Few, a visualisation guru whose other articles on data presentation in BI I've always enjoyed. His main theme is that data must be properly presented if it's going to be understood by the people its intended for, and I have to admit that I (along with the rest of the BI industry) haven't always taken this as seriously as we should have done. In fact, as techies, we tend to be disparaging of solutions that merely look nice especially if the technology behind is less than impressive. But at the end of the day it's the data that's important to our end users, and anyone who has spent any time with users knows that they just love a pretty, easy-to-understand output. Tableau's usp is that it is very, very good at data visualisation.

Take a look for yourself here, or even better take a look at the gallery of screenshots here for an idea of what you can produce. Nice, eh? And the thing it, it's not difficult to produce this kind of output. The UI and workflow are smooth and fast, and while it took me a few minutes to 'get' some of the concepts, once I knew what I was doing I found it was very easy to produce some quite impressive-looking reports. Some of the more mature clients for Analysis Services out there look decidedly dated and clunky in comparison...

The only downside I can see is the price: at $999 for Standard Edition and $1799 for Professional Edition (and it seems like you need the latter to be able to connect to Analysis Services), it is VERY expensive. They are going to have to be able to market themselves very well to compete, but I think the gap is there for this kind of niche product. I hope they do well.

New version of the BI Portal

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 17:17:46 GMT

Duncan Lamb points to the new version of the BI Portal (some of you might remember the previous version), which is available here. I first saw this demoed about 18 months ago when I still worked at Microsoft and I'm glad it's got an 'offical' release at last. The only disappointment is that this is a sample app, which I guess means it's not going to be supported - not that that will stop people putting it into production, I'm sure.