SharePoint 2010 and PerformancePoint Services

I decided to spend some time configuring and using PerformancePoint Services (PPS) on my Windows 7 SharePoint install.  I had never installed SQL on Win7 to this point, so I popped in the SQL 2008 R2 disc (so I can later add PowerPivot) and installed the DBMS, SSAS, SSIS, and SSRS with integrated configuration.  The key pieces to me were-

1. DBMS so that I could hook up some AdventureWorks sample data
2. SSAS (Analysis Services) for the cube to do analytical reporting in PPS
3. SSRS (Reporting Services) for future deployment of sample reports and custom built reports

After I had SQL in place, I visited codeplex to get the AdventureWorks sample databases for SQL 2008 R2.  The installer will add the databases to your SQL 2008 R2 install but you will have to select the correct instance.  In my case, SharePoint 2010 was running off of a CE DB version so I did not want to select the “SharePoint” DB instance.

Now, that I had my data, I had to drill down to the Analysis services cube sample project and open it into Business Intelligence Design Studio (BIDS) which looks a lot like Visual Studio 2008.  Once there I opened the sample cube project and checked the deployment target was correctly set in the project properties.  Simple matter of right clicking the project and choosing deploy to get the cube installed.  (Sample project usually is found in this path:  (C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL Server100ToolsSamplesAdventureWorks Analysis Services Project) 

I already had a PerformancePoint Service application running, but had not created the unattended service account.  To do this, I had to:

1. Navigate to the Secure Store Service Application page
2. In the ribbon, Generate a Key and issue the passphrase
3. Return to the PPS service application
4. Create the Secure Store unattended user (which will now appear in the Secure Store Service Application page)

Ok, now you can create a new site collection based on the Business Intelligence template.  Once the site is created, you can navigate to the click once deployment button that will install Dashboard Designer on your local machine.

Once in Dashboard Designer, create a new Data Source connection to the SSAS cube.  Then, click the create tab and choose Analytic Report.  You can take some data points and drop them in as rows and columns using the GUI interface.  Once you are happy with the results save the report.  Now, create a dashboard and add the report to the dashboard and save that.  Finally, right click the dashboard and choose deploy. 

Now, you can find the dashboard page in your SharePoint instance.  Here are some shots of what I was able to create to highlight some basic functionality:

Initial Report (KPI was generated from a Task list as my “Hello KPI” trial run and is not connected to the Analytic report)  Right clicking on Geography, Country, … gives this context menu:

Right clicking on Measure gives this menu (Decomp Tree!)

 

Decomp Tree is pretty slick-The control is on a layout ASPX page but is built using Silverlight.  You can hover over the boxes for more details but my screen cap won’t let me show that part.

Enjoy and have fun making pretty and informative reports using these out of box mechanisms.