Webcast of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 & Personal BI

Well I hope everyone is doing well this fine Tuesday. We are very close to the summer equinox and that means the longest day of the year! I love summer time, it's full of fun times, water activities as well as opining for the beach!

With that, I wanted to post a link to the recent webcast I lead via MSDynamicsWorld.com. The link to the web cast can be accessed from the following resource.: The Power of Personal BI with Dynamics AX 2012: PowerPivot and Power View



Now there is for sure one point that I need to clarify from this webcast. Specifically the question was asked around what version's of SharePoint & SQL Server are needed in order to enable specific aspects of what we reviewed during the webcast. When looking at this from a Microsoft Office Excel 2013 perspective, then the topic of SharePoint & SQL Server version for that matter in what was shown, is not relevant. Meaning, it does not affect what you can do with Excel 2013 in context to what was covered.



However when we look at enabling PowerView from SharePoint, launched within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 then we need to better understand what versions of software do impact what functionality. Thus we have the above pictured diagram from Microsoft. It shows that indeed we do need more than standard versions of MOSS & SQL Server for different levels of functionality, including that last part of the webcast around PowerView & SharePoint.

I hope that this is helpful to people. During the session we have a lot of great questions, and feedback. Keep in mind, this is not edited but is a full capture of the entire webcast itself. Finally, I encourage you to send me any questions around this and just think about how Personal BI can help craft a reporting story for your company! If you would like to know more, you can contact us here.: Sunrise Contact Page.

Well that is all for now. I know that I'm behind a bit in getting some of the previously targeted topics posted. It's a sign of the current times, with being busy. It's good to be busy, and so there will be plenty to cover soon. Til Next Time!


Visit Hillstar Business Intelligence (www.HillstarBI.com) in order to truly unlock your data trapped in your Microsoft Dynamics investment. With our value driven business intelligence strategy Hillstar help you transform into a data informed company.


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AX 2012 R2 & The Power of Personal BI

I hope everyone finds themselves doing well this fine summer Friday. Always something about Friday's, and specifically those where the sun stays out and beckons us back to our childhood days. With that, I wanted to post today and bring to your reading attention an upcoming virtual event. It's free and you can attend right from your desk. This event is being hosted by MSDynamicsWorld.com a long time sponsor of this blog.



The event is next Friday, June 14th starting at 11:00 AM EST. The following is a description from the event.: (register here)
"The real value of business intelligence (BI) comes from crafting a story based on an organization's data. For the manager, analyst, or individual contributor, BI typically begins with desktop tools like Microsoft Excel. With the right skills and know-how, personal BI can become the gateway to a robust BI initiative at any organization.




Visit Hillstar Business Intelligence (www.HillstarBI.com) in order to truly unlock your data trapped in your Microsoft Dynamics investment. With our value driven business intelligence strategy Hillstar help you transform into a data informed company.

Join Microsoft Dynamics AX MVP and BI expert Brandon George of Sunrise Technologies for an examination of Microsoft PowerPivot & Power View with Dynamics AX 2012 R2. The webcast will look at how these tools can empower both functional and technical resources at the individual level to discover new insights and improve operational outcomes. Learn how to put data to work and further build towards organizational BI needs from personal BI artifacts."

The event represented above, is specifically around Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 & Personal BI. I've wrote a lot about this topic in the past, and so I think its very important to reference such resources in regard to this upcoming event. The following is such a list, that I think would be helpful to anyone who is wanting to attend, or already signed up to do so.

• Understanding the natural flow of the BI Semantic Model
• Why all the fuss around BI? - Data Ownership
• AX-OData Queries Home on CodePlex
• AX 2012 Personal BI - By Example - Customer Aging III
• From Power View to Cube and back again

With the above resources your well on the way to understanding what will be talked to and covered in this upcoming event. I would highly encourage you to attend it, as I'm planning for it to be engaging! Speaking of engaging, that is the whole goal we after. All of this, every bit of it builds to the point of creating a System of Engagement. Where we can truly help turn users, into fans!

Well that it's for now, I will be back to posting next week with some really interesting stuff. Anyone want to go on the wild ride of predictive analytic's? It's like stepping into a quantum time machine! Well it's really more about understanding & owning your companies data assets. That's whats coming soon, so check back next week and make sure to attend next Friday's virtual event!

Finally, if you would like to know more about putting your companies data to work for you. Then make sure to reach out, and contact Sunrise Technologies so we can help craft a BI & reporting story for you! Til Next Time!


Visit Hillstar Business Intelligence (www.HillstarBI.com) in order to truly unlock your data trapped in your Microsoft Dynamics investment. With our value driven business intelligence strategy Hillstar help you transform into a data informed company.


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From Power View to Cube and back again - A Recap Friday

Well what have we here now? Another Friday has settled upon us. Man what busy week this has been, filled with all kinds of great things. I wanted to take the time, and just post a recap of sorts from this & last weeks post. The goal and focus of these past weeks have been around truly using the BI Semantic Model within the context of Dynamics AX 2012 R2.



Without a doubt for each of the topics covered, there is plenty of room for extended reach & depth of knowledge. We can easily spend hours, upon hours within Power View design concepts and more. Further, we could opine and expound on the many depths that exist within the realm of SSAS cubes. Topics as deep as Tuples, and the underlying structures that contain our aggregated measures & dimension attributes. However, while there might be some value for certain people in such a deep journey of understanding for each of the fore mentioned topics, the point would be lost of what the goal really is.



That goal my friends is the enablement of quick consumption of data assets. This is the real goal of any business intelligence story that is to be crafted for a company. Owning the data, and turning that data into a real asset that goes to work for companies. With this goal in mind then, the following is a recap of the recent post, with the goal of quickly getting you up & running with Power View. Further, showing you how *any* cube can be the target for such personal BI artifacts.

• AX 2012 R2 and PowerView - Part I
• AX 2012 R2 and PowerView - Part II Extending
• The Cube behind the Power View - Part I - Perspective
• The Cube behind the Power View - Part II - Create, Deploy & Process

Now having each of these reviewed, you should see how simple it really is to empower yourself and your company or clients to truly start embracing the full BI Semantic Model. When Microsoft Dynamics AX is your system of record, and acting as your main data mart, then you have a great BI offering built right into the product. This is what we refer to as Tier 1 BI for Dynamics AX customers. Meaning that nothing but the stack of Office+SharePoint+SQL Server (OSS) is used to craft a BI story for a company. It's very feasible, and does not take a deep understanding of the empowering underlying technologies to get started.

Well that's all I wanted to gab about today with you. The end result is less focus around what tool really, and more about the data. To much focus at times is placed in the ecosystem currently around specific tools, and myths of 'removing IT' from the equation. The goal is putting your data to work for you, and then the tool comes into focus for the specific BI artifacts that are needed to get the job done.



I would like to add an interesting note here. This is actually my first full blog post, from my new Surface Pro 128 GB version. I'm typing this from the 'real keyboard' cover type as well as having the use of the Surface mouse and stylus for completion of task. I must say I'm very impressed and really looking to push this to the limits. Til Next Time!
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The Cube behind the Power View - Part I - Perspective

Recently I started a series on making the most use of Power View for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2. This is a great new tool that helps further complete the personal BI story for Dynamics AX customers. It's enabled within a framework delivered as part of the current version from Microsoft, and part of that framework is the consumption of SQL Server Analysis Services Cubes.



Before we get into the 'cube behind the Power View', lets recap with the following resources in how we arrived here. The following is the list of post that should be read, before reading this post.

• AX 2012 R2 and PowerView - Part I (Understanding)
• AX 2012 R2 and PowerView - Part II Extending

With the above list, and what was covered in mind, now we can look into the cube that powered this concept. The whole point that I was trying to get across with the above to post is that it's easy to extend the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Power View Framework. Further to this point, not only can you extend from the base cubes that exists within Dynamics AX, but also any cube database you create and cube contained within.



The above image is the final representation of a cube created from a perspective with the AOT. Unlike perspectives within cubes themselves, these are elements within the AOT that allow the modeling of a SQL Server Analysis Services Cube. We can see in the following image, that is the starting point for our custom cube.



Perspectives are made up of Table & View elements from within the AOT as well. You must think in terms of facts that you want to measure, and dimensions to slice said measures via. This is the point of tables, and views to provide such facts and dimensions & attributes. We can see in the following image, the tables & views that make up our targeted perspective. It happens to be the InventTable, as well as, the SalesLineCube & CustTableCube view elements.



After having set our perspective targets from the tables & views we can make use of, our next focus is around the properties of each. What we see in the following series of images, is the properties of the InventTable, SalesLineCube & CustTableCube as they sit within the perspective. What we make a choice for each, is how we are modeling our to-be cube outcome.


InventTable Element Properties.




SalesLineCube Element Properties.




CustTableCube Element Properties.

You will note that the SalesLineCube provides both measures as well as dimensions. Further it is the targeted transaction table, in which the cube will build measures from. This is why we have this property marked as such. Further you will note that the other two elements are left as auto and only have dimension label established for them. This then allows Dynamics AX to understand we want each of these elements to be dimension elements against our "fact table" represented in the SalesLineCube element.

Moving along from this point, our next focus is to pick which elements we want to become measures, and then finally what we want as dimension attributes. Keep in mind, that we will make use of the SalesLineCube view as both a fact table containing measures as well as dimension attribute values to slice via. Lets start with the measures on the SalesLineCube. I'm going to show the following image, that is an example of each what this should look like. Then have a list of each measure we care about to finalize our needs.



What we see in the above image is the targeted SalesQty field, from the SalesLineCube view element in the perspective. We see the properties for said field, in how we label it, type of being a measure, and further the default total type of sum. Having this, now we can use the following list to create our final measures.:

• SalesQty - 'Sales Qty' - Measure - Sum
• SalesPrice - 'Sales Price' - Measure - Sum
• SalesStatus - 'Order Status' -Attribute - (blank)
• ShippingDateConfirmed - 'Ship Date' - Attribute - (blank)
• CreatedDateTime1 - 'Created Date' - Attribute - (blank)

Having the above established for the SalesLineCube element in the perspective, next we can do similar setup for both the InventTable, as well as the CustTableCube. Keep in mind, that the InventTable, when modeled as a cube will be 'Product Information'. Further CustTableCube, will show up as 'Customer Information.'
InventTable

• ItemId - 'Item Id' - Attribute
• ABCRevenue - 'ABC Rev' - Attribute

Moving forward still we will need to complete our dimensions from the CustTableCube view element. Doing this is very similar to what we just did, selecting fields that are meaningful in which our dimension attributes should target. These will be used, to slice & dice our measures with. The following is the list for the 'Customer Information' dimension set.
CustTableCube

• AccountNum - 'Account Id' - Attribute
• GroupName - 'Group' - Attribute
• Name - 'Customer Name' - Attribute
• CountryRegionId - 'Country' - Attribute

Now having the above set for the perspective, we have now modeled what we want our new 'Sales Data' cube to be made of. Having these specific measures, as well as dimension attributes specified will allow Dynamics AX 2012 R2 to build out our cube as desired. That is where this part I of 'The Cube behind the Power View' ends. We will pick this back up in my next post, for proceeding with creating a new Analysis Service project, deploying, processing and finally consuming. Til Next Time!

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AX 2012 R2 and PowerView - Part II Extending

What a great day to be alive! I know for a lot of people, including myself, today has special meaning. It's about faith, and remembering that we are finite and need our Creators grace & mercy. So I must first hope that everyone has a blessed good Friday, and you find yourselves doing well. Further, today I wanted to continue the series I started yesterday around Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 & PowerView.

For those that are just reading this post, you can go to Part I of this series located here.: AX 2012 R2 and PowerView - Part I. Having the knowledge gained from that post, we can now continue with extending PowerView for AX 2012 R2 with our own custom cube!.



We start this journey by focusing on where the PowerView data connections and artifacts are stored within Enterprise Portal. You can see this location in the above screen shot from the demo image I'm using as my target. This is located in.: 'http://[site]/sites/DynamicsAX/Power View Reports/'.



Having the location open, we can then target creating a new data source that we will want PowerView to consume. As we can see in the above image, we target a new data source by simply adding one to the document library. Further what's important to not, as seen in the below image, is the connection type and the connection string.



You will not that we have a connection type that is very specific to enabling PowerView artifact creation. This type is called.: Microsoft BI Semantic Model for Power View. Further the connection string is very important as well. This happens to be pointing to a custom SSAS Cube Database and further a custom SSAS cube.



These where both created from the BI Project wizard within Dynamics AX 2012 R2, from a perspective representing the Measures & Dimensions desired. The following is an example connection string that is valid, that you can easily adjust for your own needs.

Provider=MSOLAP.5;Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=True;Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=sunSalesAnalysis initial;Cube=Sales Analysis

Now having this in place, we can test our connection and save the new data source for PowerView usage. This is the default library where the PowerView managed code looks for data sources to make use of. Going back to the information in the first post on this topic, that means that when an action menu item passing in a data source name as the parameter, it is in reference to the data sources living in this specific document library on Enterprise Portal.



Having done a successful save of the data source, you should see something very similar to the above screen shot. This means that we are ready to move back into Dynamics AX 2012 R2 for completing our extending of PowerView. Like all things in Dynamics AX, this extension should remain within an AOT project.



What we see in the above screen shot is that project, including having highlighted the custom action menu item that will launch our PowerView design process. You will notice that I'm targeting the name given to the data source that lives in the document library on EP. That is the parameter value that will launch PowerView to target the specific custom cube.



Having created the menu item, and launching it, we see in the above image a field list from the custom cube I created from the above mentioned perspective.



This literally took under two hours to complete, from cube to launching into the design space. To further bring home the point that this is a separate cube database, and cube, please reference the below image.



You can see that I have a new cube catalog, or database as well as a custom cube called Sales Analysis. Further you can see in the above image the dimension structure in which we can slice our measure via. Again, this was 100% generated from a perspective within the AOT. Having completed this, we can now create compelling visualizations with PowerView based on the custom cube.



Further having completing such visualizations, saving these to the 'Power View Reports' document library we can surface these and execute them as web parts, or full screen mode.



The above knowledge, mixed with the first post of this series, should enable you to start easily taking full advantage of Power View, well beyond the out-of-the-box cubes. Having these powerful visualizations that allow power users to help complete a BI story for a customer is the icing on-top of the BI cake represented by the Microsoft Stack. This will truly help you to engage your user base and help you down the continue journey of Creating a System of Engagement!

That's all I have for this post. Feel free to comment or leave me any questions you might have. Further, I will back into the cube creation process behind this in a new post, so that there is a complete story from end-to-end for you. Keep in mind, this would work for *any* cube. This does not have to be just the Dynamics AX cubes. Further you can start to see how this can be placed throughout the Dynamics AX forms and user experience. Til Next Time!
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