Visio — Who Knew?

Last week I went to a 2 day data visualization class on Visio 2007.   All I can say is that I owe Visio an appology.  Up until now I pretty much only considered Visio for basic tool that was pretty much good for generating flow charts and that was it.   And even when PerformancePoint Server came out I really only thought the Visio integration with PPS was nothing more than an easy out way for them to do strategy maps (instead of writing a new chart type object) while pushing Visio in the process. 

Boy was I wrong.   I never realized what you could actually do with it.   I can now definately see us using it more than I ever though we would.  

TGO Named 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards Finalist

We found out the other day that our company, TGO Consulting, was named as a finalist in the 2008 Partner of the Year Awards.   We were nominated in the Information Worker Solutions — Performance Management Partner of the Year category.   Basically there is an award winner and two runners-up.   Considering this is a worldwide award, with nominees from all over the world competing, being named in the top 3 is very, very cool.   We are all really happy about this as it really provides a prositive feedback to us that all our hard work and early adoption of a technology is being recognized.

A full list of all the awards and all the finalists and winners can be found at the Microsoft web site.

More on Virtual Earth and PPS

Over the last few months we have been building some demo scenarios of PerformancePoint Server for Microsoft Canada.  These are to help highlight to Microsoft employees how PerformancePoint can be used in different industries.  In order to do this we developed a series of high-level models and dashboards that were industry specific.  One of the things we did were some integrations of Virtual Earth maps with PPS.  Basically linking maps to different Scorecards.  We just didn’t use generic maps but we populated them with custom pushpin icons and line of business data.  Everyone really liked what they saw, so I thought I would provide detailed information on how to do accomplish this.  This is long, so to save space on the main page, follow the link at the bottom of this post for the rest of the instructions and screen shots and sample code.

Before we start there are some things you need to remember!

1. Virtual Earth is not free to use in a commercial environment.  It does carry a cost.  There is a minimum yearly payment that translates to roughly about $0.02 per use.  However there are different pricing variables (as there always are with Microsoft licensing) including what counts as a use.  So you have to contact your Microsoft rep for specific pricing information.  I did get verification that you can use it free in a demonstration/mock-up environment however.

 

2. The integration of Virtual Earth and PPS is not out-of-the-box functionality.  And unfortunately PPS does not actually create Virtual Earth maps for you.  We are talking custom code her people!

 

3. To do this correctly you will need to have HTML/ASPX and XML skills and be able to take data from your data source and put it into the correct XML file format for Virtual Earth to consume.  In a mock-up or demo situation you can probably hack away and get this to work but for production be prepared to rely upon developer type skill sets.

 

4. The on-line SDK for Virtual Earth is good, but as I learned through trial and errors, sometimes the sample code it generates for you is a little “off”.  These little errors ended up costing me many hours of work.  That being said, I am not a programmer by trade and my development skills are questionable at best.  A true developer might have caught these right off the bat.

 

5. The 3D mode of Virtual Earth does not work inside a Virtual PC or Virtual Server environment (i.e., you are running the map from the browser inside the image).  This is because the simulated graphics card of VPC/VS does not support hardware acceleration which is required for 3D in Virtual Earth.  To view maps in 3D you will have to hit the image from a normal desktop machine to test.  As above, this one little item alone cost me a couple hours of work before I figured it out.

 

6. Believe it or not, one of my most daunting tasks was actually trying to find the right type of icons for my map to give it the look and feel that I wanted.   There are not that many free icons out there that are relevant and look good.  The ones I chose are fine for now as they allow non-commercial use, but to put this into production I would have to either buy them or find different ones.  For this reason, I have not included them in my post.

 

7. When creating maps of this type, remember that Virtual Earth does not use physical addresses to determine locations but longitude and latitude.   To do this in a production environment you will either need to manually look up each location’s longitude and latitude or utilize a service that converts street addresses for you.  Do a web search for “geocode” and you will find different free and pay services that can do this conversion for you.