Category: Client Tools

Microsoft buys Proclarity

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:
 
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:
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

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

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

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

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:
Unfortunately I couldn’t get into the LiveMeeting recording that it links to. Here’s more reaction:
 
Most important of all, though, the video of the PDC presentation on Excel BI is now available to download at
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

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

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

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

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.