Category: Business Objects

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Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Dashboard


System Center, in particular Config Manager aka SCCM, is becoming more and more popular with customers and clients at work. People looking to start enhancing and automating tasks such as OS deployment, app distribution, patch management etc as well as those who’ve started down this path, often with Altiris, and are now looking for a more rounded solution, are all asking for/happy to listen to information about SCCM. There’s more info on SCCM as a product here but in this post I specifically want to talk about the Dashboard that’s in beta.

About the Dashboard

System Center Config Manager Dashboard’s aim is to make it even easier for IT administrators to access and digest key information about their network and infrastructure, quickly and effortlessly even when not at the Management Console. The Dashboard lets you:

  • Track OS & App deployments
  • Track Security updates
  • Check the health status of computers
  • Check compliance with IT regulations

all via a customizable web interface. It’s based on Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) so it’s key features include:

  • Easy access to key information without using the Configuration Manager console  
  • Centralized view of Configuration Manager data sets
  • Data can be viewed in graph, table, or Dundas* gauge formats
  • You can create custom dashboards for different departments, based on site user’s group membership.

    • *I will try and confirm is this is limited to Dundas or whether SAP’s Crystal Xcelsius can be used here too.

    Join the Beta Program

    Sign up to the English only Beta here.

    How it works:

    Here’s a great diagram from the technet site:

    Ff369719.image1(en-us,TechNet.10).jpg

    The Process Flow goes a little something like this:

  • An IT Service Manager requests a new data set.
  • The IT Administrator uses the Dashboard Configuration Web Part to define the new data set.
  • The IT Administrator stores the configuration information for the new data set (the information is saved in the Windows SharePoint Services Content database).
  • The IT Administrator adds a new copy of the Dashboard Viewer Web Part to the default Configuration Manager Dashboard and then modifies the Web part to display the new data set.
  • The IT Service Manager browses to the Configuration Manager Dashboard site.
  • Windows SharePoint Services queries the Configuration Manager site database as specified by the data set configuration.
  • Windows SharePoint Services renders the new data set using the Dashboard Viewer Web Part.

    • The Technet page is here:

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff369719.aspx

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    What’s New in SQL Server 2008 R2


    SQL Server 2008 R2 aka Kilmajaro is due for release on May 6th, 2010 and is a much more Business Intelligence focused release. It has a bunch of new features as well as a number of improvements to existing features.

    What’s New?

    There are three main new features which we’ll take a look at here:

    Master Data Services:

    This is a “database, configuration tool, Web application, and Web service” that is used to “manage your organization’s master data and maintain an auditable record of that data as it changes over time”. This can then serve up the data for BI & Reporting tools such as Sharepoint, SSRS, SAP Crystal Reports etc for use around the business.

    For information on architecture, deployment, security and more, see here. A great getting started guide can be found here

    PowerPivot for Sharepoint

    “Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint extends SharePoint 2010 and Excel Services to add server-side processing, collaboration, and document management support for the PowerPivot workbooks that you publish to SharePoint”.

    PowerPivot enables Excel workbooks to easily work with over 1,000,000 rows of data and still perform quick calculations…see my other post here.

    3 tier diagram of client, middle, backend add-ins

    .A great MSDN look at PowerPivot for Sharepoint can be found here.

    Multi-Server Administration and Data-Tier Application:

    This “forms a central repository for performance data and management policies that tailor the operation of instances of the Database Engine”. It also includes the ability to connect to a SQL Azure Database.

    More info on the manageability side of SQL 2008 R2 is here.

    What’s Enhanced?

    SQL Server Reporting Services (SRSS) have been given a huge boost in SQL 2008 R2, to help bring them closer to dedicated Business Intelligence platforms such as SAP Business Objects Crystal Reports Servers and Business Object EDGE.

    Sharepoint Integration: New features include:

    • Support for multiple Sharepoint Zones
    • New Data extension
    • Query designer for Sharepoint Lists as a data source
    • Right to Left text w/Arabic  & Hebrew

    and more. You can now use data held in lists inside Sharepoint and include that in your reports, for more info head over to Getting Data from a SharePoint List Data Source Type (Report Builder 3.0).

    Report Parts: This is a great feature which allows you store parts of reports on the server, to be re-used by you (or others) at a later date. This means if you’ve got someone who’s awesome at making charts, they can pre-create them and load them up on the server for the benefit of the rest of the team/business 🙂

    Report Part Publishing LifeCycle:

    image

    You can publish the following report parts:

  • Charts
  • Gauges
  • Images and embedded images
  • Maps
  • Parameters
  • Rectangles
  • Tables
  • Matrices
  • Lists

    • This makes it quite similar to SAP Xcelsius but I don’t think it is as fully featured and also, and perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t seem anywhere near as end user friendly.

    MSDN have got more info on Report Part Publishing here.

    Wrap Up:

    I hope this has gone some way to explaining some of the new features of SQL Server 2008 R2 and that it helped show how these can help you and your business 🙂
    The full MSDN article with almost literally 100’s of how to’s, guides and FAQ’s is here:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb500435(SQL.105).aspx

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    A great example of Crystal Xcelsius


    Crystal Xcelsius is a fantastic product and some of the things that people do with are amazing…huge data visualizations laid out on maps with automatically refreshing data and various gauges, sliders, graphs and all sorts:

     

    Thanks to http://dashboardsbyexample.com/

    I’m pretty sure that the Wall Street Journal Election Calculator was created in Xcelsius-you can find it here.

    It does a great job of making boring, grey spreadsheets and reports much more engaging, interesting and effective. However, I’ve never found an example I can use on a regular basis…but now i have 🙂

    Web 2.0 Presentation Tools from SAP – this set of tools from SAP’s Timo Elliott is great. They use Crystal Xcelsius to integrate Twitter into your Powerpoint presentations-how great does that sound?!

    I had a little play around with it earlier and used it to show tweets about MS licensing, scrolling live across the bottom. Twitter keeps increasing in popularity as a way of interacting with presenters and of giving feedback during a talk, when it can still make a difference. These tools mean you don’t need to have separate apps running on your machine or even a separate machine used solely to receive & manage Twitter feedback.

    You can download the Powerpoint with guides and the tools to integrate it yourself here:

    http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/2009/10/web-20-presentation-tools-from-sap-integrate-twitter-into-powerpoint/

    I really like this. It’s very useful, current and a great advert for SAP’s Xcelsius technology.

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    Crystal Reports Server 2008: New Features


    As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Microsoft is my #1 software of choice, both here and at work-but I am also a fan of Crystal Reports (now from SAP).

    Crystal Reports Server 2008 is their very successful product for serving up reports with automating & scheduling capabilities-and this month, it got a Service Pack. It added a number of new features but the 2 that I find most interesting are:

    Report Bursting:

    Report Bursting allows you to run a report once and produce subsets of results specific to different users; this is used to generate bank statements for example. This feature was previously only available in the more enterprise products from SAP-but is now available to the mid-market 🙂 I see this being a huge benefit to a lot of our customers…

    Auditing: Report Auditing allows companies to see who is viewing what reports, when, for how long etc, which can be very useful for ensuring that your Business Intelligence (BI) efforts are paying off and being found relevant by users.

    There are a number of other features around Sharepoint and .NET integration that I will detail a little later…

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    Performance Point Server killed off?


    Performance Point Server (PPS) has been part of the Microsoft product portfolio for a while now but, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t really made much of an impact. It’s been the top-end, full featured Business Intelligence (BI) product but the uptake hasn’t been amazing and MS announce there won’t be another standalone version of PPS, making Performance Point Server 2007 the last.

    A lot of clients I work with who you would expect to jump on PPS have stayed away and they aren’t the only ones. The impression I get is that most people are unsure about Microsoft’s credentials in this part of the BI arena; they’re not sure that PPS will stack up against competitors such as SAP (Business Objects), Oracle (Hyperion) and IBM (Cognos) when it gets to the nitty gritty high end enterprise features. PPS isn’t cheap-coming in at around 17K-and when companies invest at that kind of level, they need to be completely confident they will get the best possible return on their investment.

    However, this isn’t the end for Performance Point Server, or at least it’s component parts. As expected the scorecarding, dashboard and analytics features will all be folded into Sharepoint 14 (due this year/early 2010) and the new “Performance Point Services for Sharepoint” will be available via the Enterprise CAL.

    I think this is a really good idea and will certainly increase peoples usage of MS BI and thus help increase their market share. The proliferation of MOSS 2007 (Sharepoint) throughout all market sectors means an amazing amount of people will have much easier access to these tools. It will make it yet another compelling reason for people to make the move to Sharepoint and for those that already have (but didn’t take Software Assurance)-a good reason to upgrade. By removing a product from the portfolio it looks like MS will increase the use of that product as well as grow it’s (Sharepoint) revenue at the same time…good skills 🙂

    From the official statement:

    “Additionally, in the summer of 2009, we will release ‘Service Pack 3′ for PerformancePoint Server 2007, which will include updates to the Planning module. From there we will focus our development on the new monitoring and analytic capabilities in ‘PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint’ and will not offer standalone versions of PerformancePoint Server.”

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