PerformancePoint SP2 – Planning Fixes and a mini-feature

Jeremy has already announced the release of PerformancePoint Server SP2 and it’s great to see that the PPS dev team hit their target release date !  I’ve spent a little commute time this morning checking out the documentation, admittedly I’ve initially focused on the Planning component and there are no great surprises (Tim has already told you about the new bits) but I have spotted what could arguably be described as a mini-feature surrounding form validation that I’m sure that will come in useful.

As you would expect, previously released hot fixes have been packaged up into this service pack:

954710 Description of the PerformancePoint Server 2007 hotfix package: July 1, 2008

955432 Description of the PerformancePoint Server 2007 hotfix package: July 14, 2008

955751 Description of the PerformancePoint Server 2007 hotfix package: July 28, 2008

956553 Description of the PerformancePoint Server 2007 hotfix package: August 21, 2008

Plus fixes to issues not previously addressed:

Excel Add-In Related

• You locally save and close a form in PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel. When you reopen the form, you are prompted to update the form. However, you expect that you are not prompted to update the form because the form is already up to date.

• In PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel, you open an offline form assignment. In the form assignment, you add a link to an external Excel worksheet in a cell. Then, you submit the changes to the PerformancePoint Planning Server database. However, when you reopen the assignment, the link that you added is not retained.

• After you install PerformancePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 1, you create a page filter in PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel. You have a user in PerformancePoint Server 2007 that does not have permission to the default member of the page filter. However, the user has permission to other leaf members in the page filter. When the user opens a report that uses this page filter, the user receives the following error message:Cannot render the matrix. The server returned the following error: The cube either does not exist or has not been processed.
  
  However, in the release version of PerformancePoint Server 2007, the next member that the user has access to will be automatically selected for use in the page filter.

• You define data validation in a worksheet of Excel. However, you can still submit a form in PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel if data in the form is not validated.

• You have a matrix that is based on a large and complex model in PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel. You open the Select Filters dialog box to change a page filter for this matrix. When you click the Value column of the filter, the dialog box that displays the dimension members takes a long time to display.

Business Rules Related

• After you migrate an application in PerformancePoint Server 2007 from one server to another server, the order of user-defined business rules and system business rules in models is not preserved.

• You cannot use the datamember function in the ALLOCATE statement and in the TRANSFER statement.

• Consider the following scenario. You create an automatic rule that uses MdxQuery implementation or Native MdxQuery implementation in Planning Business Modeler. Then you submit changes to the source data that the rule uses from an assignment form. The submission causes the model to be reprocessed. Because model reprocess causes rules in the automatic rule set to be executed, you expect that the target data of the automatic rule will reflect the change by the form submission. However, after the model is reprocessed, the target data of the automatic rule does not reflect the change.

• Rule expression of system business rules uses dimension member names instead of dimension member labels in PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Planning Business Modeler Related

• You have a model that contains many form templates and assignments. When you try to change objects in the model in Planning Business Modeler, Planning Business Modeler crashes.

• You create a member property of the Date data type in a dimension in PerformancePoint Server 2007. Additionally, you specify the Set value to Null option when you create the member property. When you retrieve the value of this member property, you obtain a value of 1899-12-31T00:00:00. However, you expect that you obtain a value of blank.

• You cannot schedule recurring jobs for a frequency that is less than an hour.

• When a user updates a business rule in Planning Business Modeler, the audit log file of PerformancePoint Server 2007 logs the user ID of the user that created the rule. However, you expect that the audit log file logs the user ID of the user that updated the rule.

• Consider the following scenario. You create a dimension that has no hierarchy in a localized version of PerformancePoint Server 2007. Then you perform one of the following operations:
  • You run the bsp_DI_CreateHierarchyLabelTableForDimension stored procedure to create label-based hierarchy table for the dimension.
  • You perform the Prepare the Staging DB operation in PerformancePoint Planning Data Migration Tool.
    In this scenario, you receive the following error message:
    A problem was encountered while attempting to connect to, or Execute BSP on, the specified Database.
    For more information regarding this error please review the Application Event Log on the SQL Server for any “MSSQLSERVER ERRORS”
    and / or please check that all parameters in the UI are correct and try again.