I had a communication recently with an old partner who had, like me spent a lot of time learning and qualifying for their PPS certification. He wanted to know what relevance the qualification now has in the Microsoft certification process for a Microsoft Partner.

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Well, it was a bit of a blow. I had proudly done my research, worked for a MCTS qualification in PPS (which I might tell you is 80% Planning modules and 20% Dashboard Designer) and all for what? For Microsoft to pull it off the shelves which basically means there will be no new sales, clients or consultants working on the product. I have read loads of blogs and comments bitterly complaining about the reversal of fortune, but actually, if Microsoft thinks PPS Planning won't make it in the current climate, then there is not much we can do other than vent frustration. Now we need to look for alternatives.

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This entry was provoked by a question in a professional forum - so here is my response with some added bits.

Has anybody developed a "serious and working" (not prototype or such) budgeting infrastructure with PPS out there?

Serious eh..? Yes, but I'm not sure whether the client is using it to budget seriously. The question implies a certain skepticism that PPS is really suitable or is in actual live use somewhere in the world (the questionner is from Italy). So here is my story of a serious implementation by way of proof but also as a reminder of the work involved. This is for a relatively straight forward single-company deployment which meant that I was directly involved in every part, so please forgive all the 'I did this, I did that' stuff.

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The standard Microsoft doco called 'PerformancePoint Server Operations Guide.doc' has some very useful info, but I found that some examples do not work without tweaks. This is the bit (around pages 39 of 374 !) about granting user permissions and access to the PPS staging database so that the data integration users who make SSIS (Integration services) ETL packages can run imports and stored procedures which work on the staging database.

You will require sql administrator access to your SQLServer instance to perform these tasks, and need to know how to run SQL Server Management Studio. Below is a shot of the default users associated with a new PPS staging database.

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When constructing model components in PBM or adding data you have to consider how to name things. Labels have to be unique (across an entire model) and less than 40 characters (no funny stuff : _*()'@?/"!\-+{}[]) , Names (256 char) and Description  (512 char) can be any unicode character. The temptation is to put something programmerish into the Label which imples order and relationship, and put the visible end-user  text in the Name or Description fields.

Schema labels - such as the PPS Application, Root site, sub-site (if used), dimension, and model labels are all used in making the Application table names and Analysis database / cube names. So keep it short and unique and avoid nasty characters if you want a hope of finding things in SQLServer. These schema labels also appear in Excel plug dialogues. Examples are shown in an earlier blog here.

Member labels - The problem is that the member Label

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Updated on Monday, January 12, 2009 at 10:39 by Mark Woodall

A common requirement in a scorecard or chart is to provide a visual presentation of how the current period values compare to the previous period.
The simple calculation would be; value of current period - value of previous period = movement (or variance or trend etc..). If the result is negative then the value has fallen, if positive it has risen and if 0 then it has not changed. So we have 3 states which can be represented by an arrows indicator. - see scorecard image below.

Current vrs Previous month trend scorecard

How can this formula be applied in a Dashboard Designer scorecard?

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Here is a short animation about creating a generic KPI from a PerformancePoint generate cube and adding it to a new scorecard object in PerformancePoint's Dashboard Designer. I thought about making a running commentary, and then realised that it wasn't really necessary, because this is just a very basic point and click procedure. This is a 2:30min video called pps-kip-tumteetum

Alternatively download the flash file attachment below for the silent version.

Using Dashboard Designer - Silent Version