On Vacation

On vacation for the next 10 days.  Visiting the lovely Prince Edward Island — home of Mars red dirt, potatoes, lobster, black flies, Anne of Green Gables and mosquitoes.  After that it is back to the grind.  I have done some preliminary work on the integration between Dynamics GP and Management Reporter and when I have time once I get caught up I will post my thoughts.

Dynamics GP to PerformancePoint Planning Integration Wizard Review

This will be a long post, so go grab yourself an adult beverage (given that it is summer, may I suggest a Mojito) and get comfortable…

Microsoft has released the integration between Dynamics GP 10.0 and PerformancePoint Server 2007.  This integration works in conjunction with the PPS Data Import Wizard and basically creates and out-of-the-box data provider for the wizard.  You can find the code for it out on PartnerSource.  Based on my playing with it, I can pretty much confirm my earlier thoughts on the subject.  In a nutshell – the integration does what it does and that is provide a basic level of integration.   However, in my opinion, most Planning deployments will probably need more than this provides.  When I have a chance I will do a follow-up post on the integration and how it works with Management Reporter.

A couple important things to note in advance:

• There is no documentation for this product yet!  None!  Nada!  Zip!   WTF!   Therefore, much of this post is based on my limited (albeit direct hands-on) experience coupled with my “guessing” of how things are working.  This has been supplemented by some great help and information I was able to get from a couple of escalation engineers at MBS.  As a side note, documentation of some sort is to be released on TechNet at some point.

 

• The integration does not import data from the Dynamics GP transaction tables, but uses the DynamicsGPWarehouse data warehouse that is created with the installation of the GP Analysis Cubes.  This is important to remember — if the customer has not purchased the cubes, then the integration won’t work.

 

• Currently support is being provided by the MBS group out of Fargo that deals with the analytics components of Dynamics GP.   They will take support cases in regards to the wizard and can take them to a certain point and then will hook you up with PPS support directly if needed.

 

• There are some bugs.  I found a major one that has been verified and submitted to development, I have two others in the process of being verified and I heard of another one that has been submitted by someone else.  At the time of me writing this post, I have about 4 hours in with support trying to troubleshoot these issues.

In order to test and learn the integration I took the current Microsoft BI image (Business Intelligence VPC Release 6.vhd) and restored a copy of the DYNAMICS, TWO, DynamicsGPWarehouse SQL databases and the GP Analysis Cubes from the latest Microsoft Dynamics GP image (Microsoft Dynamics GP 10 Technical Demonstration Toolkit.vhd).  So in all fairness this is not a true production setup but with no documentation available I wasn’t about to mess up an existing system if something went wrong. 
 

Microsoft Popfly — Democratizing Software Development

So the other day while procrastinating on cleaning up my inbox after being out of the office for a week at WPC I somehow stumbled on Microsoft Popfly.   Per the website description: “Microsoft Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, games, Web pages, and applications”.

The whole concept is to democratize software development.  For all 3 of you who read this blog, “democratizing software” is one of the latest Microsoft buzzwords.   Unbeknown to myself, apparantely all previous software has been designed by fascist imperialists whose only goal was to crush your spirit and bend you to their will.  Fight the man brother!!  Sorry I digress…

What I found cool about Popfly is the concepts of mashups.  Where you can take different building blocks and link them together to get some pretty good application results without knowing how to do development.  For instance, they have a building block for Virtual Earth, you pull that one on the page and you can display a VE map.  So that in itself is not all that impressive I grant you.  But, you combine it with the GeoName block and a custom data block containing the city and country you want to put on the map and viola’ without me writing a single line of code I have created a custom map.  Pretty slick.

Now granted the functionality is still very basic and the current commercial uses of this tool are minimal and right now this really is more of a toy than a true tool.  But if Microsoft can expand upon what they have build here and apply these same concepts to their other products then the costs and complexity of implementing and integrating systems will go down dramatically.   

If you have some free time or just need a break from work, go out and take a look.

WPC Impressions

So here are my impressions of Worldwide Partner Conference.  They are in no particular order and basically this is a free-form brain dump:

• Houston is hot and muggy – very hot and muggy, I pity the people who live there and have to wear suits for a living
• The George R. Brown Convention Center seems better than most but it’s capacity was definately maxed out by the number of attendees this year
• The free bag I received may very well be the ugliest thing I have ever received
• Shiner Bock is a very good beer
• Houston has done a great job of having green space downtown with lots of trees, plants and grass
• The Hotel Indigo is great but way too far from the convention center and I hate taking the shuttle buses back and forth
• I was presented with the worst lunch I have ever been given at a convention on the Tuesday
• The opening keynotes were hit or miss but I think that Stephen Elop did a great job and was much better than when he spoke at Convergence in March
• Microsoft is heavily pushing the Software + Services philosophy and this is going to stress out tons of partners but will also be a great opportunity for those who can get their heads around it
• Worldwide Telescope is cooler than cool and you should check it out especially if you have kids
• I was surprised at the total number of Unified Communications/VOIP vendors were at the Expo — it seemed like every third booth was UC related
• I saw my first live demo of Microsoft Roundtable — totally cool but the odds of me convincing the powers that be here of shelling out the cash for it are about the same as me hitting the lottery
• Per a recommendation in a comment in another post I went for BBQ at Luling City BBQ — it was fantastic
• As usual there were some great break-out sessions and some sessions that made me want to poke an icepick through my ear into my brain

That is about it.