Download Sample Dashboards from Visio 2010 Dashboard Gallery

Dashboards are the face of a Business Intelligence solution to it's end users. Performancepoint is the key platform for dashboard development and the same are hosted on Sharepoint. I often mention this on my various posts, that Strategy Maps i.e. data driven visio diagrams are a very effective element of a dashboard constituency. Just check out the excerpt screenshot of a sample visio dashboard, and consider comparing it with a regular dashboard having just some grid and graphs. Recently one of my blog readers shared a Visio 2010 Dashboard Gallery link, which indeed is quite impressive. This gallery can be accessed from here.

Strategy Maps Tutorial

Strategy Maps are one of the constituent elements of a dashboard solution. Development of the same starts in Visio, and then those maps are used in a dashboard developed using PPS. As a MS BI professional, we are generally aware of SQL Server and the extension of our knowledge reaches out to Sharepoint. But when the question comes of Visio, most of us would throw our hands in air. Data driven strategy maps working in sync with other scorecard elements can steal the show compared to a traditional dashboard with a few KPIs and a graph. With visio services introduced in Sharepoint 2010, this experience is made more smooth, easier and appealing.

Visio Team has published an article on how to create a strategy map using containers, and it's definitely worth checking out. This article can be read from here.

Visio Services Data Authentication

Visio Services is one of the least attended MS BI service, but is one of the most effective service in terms of presentation. Visio services in Sharepoint 2010 adds a new level of capability to Data bound visio diagrams i.e. Strategy Maps. Whenever any external service / interface has to access data, authentication is of the the most primary and necessary step.

Answers to all the probable queries related to data authentication in visio services can be found from this whitepaper. You might not feel like reading this right away and I would agree to it, but it's not a bad idea to keep this whitepaper in your repository of technical reference documents.

Image Coutesy: MSDN BOL

Performance testing, Hardware Setup / Sizing and Capacity Planning for Performancepoint Services , Excel Services , Visio Services and others

One thing that I extremely admire about Microsoft is that you never fall short of reference material for anything with Microsoft. This cuts down almost half of the time you spend on benchmarking and figuring out the right tool of right size for the right project.

I have often seen many companies that engage developer or even a large strength of CoE (Center of Excellence) for collecting best practice documents, carrying out benchmarking exercise, developing POCs (Proof Of Concept) for showcasing their technical strength and maintaining their readiness for upcoming or unforeseen technical challenges. But one thing they miss to see is to check if they are re-inventing the wheel. I mean that one should always check before placing efforts to extract benchmarking results, that if tests have already been done and results are already available from a genuine and reliable source, can the derivation of the targeted tests be built upon something that is already available, is there a real requirement to start from the scratch ? Some people do really enjoy doing from the scratch for whatsoever reasons, but I value my time utmost and to me re-inventing the wheel just to prove that I can build something from scratch is no good reason to waste my time. I even find many bloggers repeating the same content that is already available at tonnes of places, or try placing great efforts to discover something that is already established and available as a whitepaper. With all due respect, in my viewpoint, this just holds the value of making oneself feeling accomplished (though meaninglessly) and nothing else.

Coming to the point, Microsoft has published whitepapers for Performance testing and capacity planning of various services and features of Sharepoint 2010. Few of these whitepapers are pretty useful for a Business Intelligence solution that involves services like Performancepoint Services, Visio Services, Excel Services, Access Services, FAST Search server and others. Below mentioned is the list of download:

Business Intelligence Related

• PerformancePoint Services Capacity Planning
• Excel Services Capacity Planning
• Visio Services Capacity Planning
• Access Services Capacity Planning
• Office WebApps Capacity Planning
• Search for SPServer 2010 Capacity Planning

Other Sharepoint 2010 Features Related

• BCS Capacity Planning
• Designing Large Lists Maximizing List Performance Whitepaper
• Divisional Portal Capacity Planning
• InfoPath 2010 Capacity Planning
• Large Scale Document Repository Capacity Planning
• MySites Social Computing Capacity Planning
• SharePoint Server Caches Performance Whitepaper
• WAS Capacity Planning
• WCM Capacity Planning
• Web Analytics Capacity Planning
• Workflow Capacity Planning

Use of Visio Services as a monitoring dashboard

Recently I read a case study where data driven Visio diagrams were used for monitoring some data centers using System Center Operations Manager. Visio 2010 Add-In for System Center Operations Manager was used for this purpose. Briefly, this add-in generates visio diagram which are fuelled by data from Operations Manager and these helps to monitor the entire Data Center or an enterprise network.

In the BI development lifecycle, typically we have ETL cycles loading data from OLTP to Relational data warehouse. And then we process the cubes and/or partitions. This lifecycle is not automated mostly in the development phase and in the production phase this is made automated on schedules. I feel that by using some house-keeping config tables that host data about the statistics of such cycles, and using a data-driven visio diagram powered by this data, one can easily create a monitoring dashboard.

Now if this diagram is shared in Sharepoint 2010, one can use Visio Services which would allow to view this diagram in a browser without requiring visio client installation. So without opening up the security of the servers, one can easily monitor these lifecycles over the web, making it possible to remotely monitor these schedules in an intelligent manner. This would save the effort of bringing PPS into picture for such internal house-keeping task or checking your Pager / Inbox for alerts / informational emails which can get either too concise or too verbose.

Visio Services and Dashboarding : Visio Web Acces web part

In the Microsoft Business Intelligence eco-system, the entire or major presentation part of the business intelligence solution is hosted as of day on Sharepoint 2010. Performancepoint Services, Visio Services, Excel Services and Silverlight can be seen as major or crucial constituents of the dashboarding solution on the Sharepoint platform. As a solution provider, I believe that one needs to have a vision of overall picture of the eco-system than keeping the focal point on only one technology, as an entire solution can never be delivered on the back on a single technology, whether it may be SSIS / SSAS / SSRS / PPS or any other part of the Microsoft BI Solution Deck. By this I am not denying the fact that one needs to develop an expertise in at least one technology of choice to keep oneself in the front league of the business, but still having an idea of how the nuts and bolts fit together is very essential in my viewpoint.

The most unnoticed part in the MS BI eco-system is Visio Services, and some would even argue that it is not even a part of BI. But in my viewpoint, just SSIS, SSAS and SSRS do not complete the MS BI solution. Coming to the point now, we know that we can create data-driven visio diagrams which can be hosted on sharepoint 2010 and visio services enables viewing of the same over a browser page.

The point of focus of this post is a web-part in Sharepoint 2010 that is dedicated to Visio much like the Silverlight web part. This web-part is called "Visio Web Access" web part under the "Office Client Applications" category. When we create a dashboard in Sharepoint 2010, we can add this web part and host our data driven (or static) visio diagram (which should be hosted on sharepoint 2010) in this web part, and it contains all the properties specific to customize the viewing of this diagram. The most interesting part of this web part is that data driven visio diagrams hosted in this web part can be linked with other web-parts, so that context sensitive data can be presented on the dashboard. Read this post for a detailed tutorial on Visio Web Access web part.

The steps towards using this web part from a very higher level can be as below:

1) Create your dashboard using Performancepoint 2010 dashboard designer and deploy it on sharepoint.

2) On the dashboard hosting page, create a visio web-access web part and specify the location of the visio file (.vdw). BTW, this web part also facilitates display using Silverlight, if installed.

3) Link this web part to other scorecards on your dashboard, to make it context sensitive.

Please keep in view that above mentioned are my views, and derived from the features published on the documentation of Sharepoint 2010. I have not tried it out, because as of this draft, I have not got a chance to get my hands on the same. But sooner or later, I should be able to manage a hands-on experience on the same and extract more tried and tested solution recipes.

Strategy Maps , Visio Services 2010 , Performancepoint Services 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 Business Intelligence

Dashboards are a very important end-deliverable in most of the business intelligence solutions. In Microsoft Business Intelligence stack of technologies, the same is developed using Performancepoint and hosted using Sharepoint. Scorecards, KPIs, Charts, Graphs, SSRS Reports are well known and commonly used constituent of any dashboard. But strategy maps is one of the less touched but quite valuable data presentation constituent on the real estate of any dashboard. Sharepoint 2010 now contains two services which would be of particular interest to the BI community : Visio Services and Performancepoint Services.

Performancepoint Dashboard Designer 2010 is a click-once application that comes as a part of Performancepoint Services in Sharepoint 2010. This can be thought of something similar to Report Builder that comes with Reporting Services in SQL Server.

Visio Services 2010 allows viewing of any visio diagrams hosted on sharepoint without any visio installation. If Silverlight is installed on the client machine, this diagrams would be displayed in an very interactive and appealing manner too. The interesting part of Visio services are it's data driven diagrams which allows binding of data from different data sources to the Visio diagrams. Watch or Download a demo of how you can bind data to a visio diagram using Microsoft Office Visio.

So now let's put these different chunks to use as mentioned in the steps below:

1) Bind the KPI data from analysis services to the strategy maps ( which can be created using Visio 2007 or 2010 ) and host this strategy maps on sharepoint 2010.

2) Using the Performancepoint Dashboard Designer 2010, create dashboards and link these strategy maps in a scorecard or web-part on your dashboard.

3) Visio Services 2010 would facilitate fetching of the data bound to the Strategy Maps (which is a diagram in Visio terminology) and display the visual accordingly on your dashboard.

This is what we call the better half of Microsoft Business Intelligence, i.e. Sharepoint Business Intelligence !!