PerformancePoint Planning Assignment Web Part for SharePoint

Update: Version 1.1 is now available

So the Adatis dev team have been busy!

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of our clients wanted to be able to show a user’s active PPS Planning assignments in their Sharepoint Portal in the same way you can see them in the assignments pane within Excel when you have the add-in installed.  “No Problem!” we said naively, assuming it wouldn’t be too tricky as everything is passed back and forth using the web service.   Anyone who has developed .Net Web Parts will know it’s a little convoluted, particularly if you want incorporate a decent user interface.  Calling the  Planning Web Service itself was relatively straight-forward though a couple of things were far from obvious and required work-arounds.

One of the development requirements was that none of the PPS dll’s should need to be installed on the server as it is purely a SharePoint box.  This made things a little more tricky as there is a bit more going on in the PPS excel add-in than just calling the web service!  It also needed to be configurable using the web part property editor as well using allowing users with the PPS Add-in installed to click on the hyperlink and open the assignment in Excel

Anyway a few weeks (a few late nights and a few more grey hairs) later it’s ready for a beta release:

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There is currently no documentation around the planning web service so we took a good look round the dll’s that get installed with PPS using a great freeware product called Reflector and managed to piece together what was going in Excel when you connected to the PPS Server.

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If anyone would like to try the web part please drop us an e-mail devteam@adatis.co.uk and we’ll be happy to send you a copy (with the usual disclaimers in case your server falls over in a heap!) in return for some testing and feedback.  We’ve only had a limited amount of time to test it so any help is much appreciated.  Once it’s stable we’ll put it on our Web site for download.

Thanks to Bully for just a little bit of help with the code ;).  Thanks also to Kevin White and Scott Heimendinger at Microsoft for some pointers in the right direction.