BI review & help

For some reason (and don't ask me why), the Panorama NovaView's documentation doesn't contain any information about some of the most important settings. Here some of them, hoping that this will help many users:

• In the Panorama Web Access web site, by default a user can  save his views (after he made his modifications) only in his private book. To enable him save his views in the Briefing Book (which means - the public book), do the following: Inside the Panorama server, open the Registry Editor (Start -> Run -> regedit) and go to the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Panorama\Nova View 5\Admin. Add a new string value named "PublicBookAdmin". As its value, enter all the users you want to give them the option to save their views in the Briefing Book by this template: <User1Domain>\<User1Name>,<User2Domain>\<User2Name>, etc. For example: panoramaDevServer\PowerUser, MSHOME\Miky.
• The subscriptions web part will show you only the views that you registered to, but by default no one can register himself to the views. What you need to do is to open the Registry Editor in the panorama server, go to the same path as mentioned above and add a string value named "ShowSubsAndAlerts" with the value 1. After that, every user will be able to right click on any view in the Panorama Web Access web site, click on Register and it will be added to the subscriptions web part for him.
  
• For some users, the loading animations which are shown before every applet appears in the Dashboard website will stay forever, meaning that the user will never see the dashboard itself. I think this has something to do with the Java or Microsoft VM of the user. Anyway, a nice workaround is to cancel this animation. To do this, enter the path C:\Program Files\Panorama\E-BI\Dashboard\include (replace the beginning if you installed to panorama software in a different location) and inside the Config.asp file, change the constant "ShowAnimationWhileLoadingApplets" value to false. This is a good workaroung because anyway, the applets should appear in a second or two. Otherwise - buy a faster server.
  

As I go on working with Panorama I'll write some more tips & tricks. Stay Tuned.

When designing a dimension in Analysis Services, there's a funny button called Add Business Intelligence. Clicking it opens a beautiful wizard which letting you define some basic properties of the dimension such as ordering and enabling writeback. I'll take the writeback feature as an example: When doing this using the wizard, it's taking you through many screen where all you have to do except for clicking next, next is to check a checkbox in one of the screens. That's it. After that, all this long wizard doing it setting a property called WriteEnabled to True. I think that it's a strange software design of Microsoft. Maybe it's for making the product seem more professional. You know - Add Business Intelligence sounds like a heavy operation. Anyway, I don't know what they had in mind.

I never thought that I'll do a commercial to Microsoft, but Project Real is a great thing that they did and they should get the credit for it. This project is a full end-to-end BI solution, including ETLs (using SSIS), Analysis Services cubes and mining modules, Reporting Services reports, end-user Panorama views and more.

We work with Panorama as our main GUI tool to show our users the cube's data as tables, charts, dashboards, etc, so this project is really helping us to learn how to implement our project from the first ETL step all the way to the last Panorama step.

Recommended.

Two days ago I talked with a friend about our feelings at work. I told him that many times I have the feeling that people just don't work. He asked me how I can see that, and I told him that they can't concentrate when they all going to have coffee or talking to each other every minute. "So, what you want them to do, sing: Work, Work, Work! all day?", he said. Then I told him this short story:

Last week I went to say hello to my friends in a very serious (and therefore successful) programming team. There were three guys (Doron, Yossi and Roy) coding there. I love challenges, so I tried to go to the other side of the room (and this team has a big room) unseen. Guess what - I made it. I went to the other side of the room and no-one saw me. They were all very concentrated on their code. I could steal everything I wanted, but you know - friends...

"That's how should people work", I told my friend. Still, I don't think that everyone can do this all the time, but I expect every worker to behave that way at least an hour or two in a day, and I promise you that their production will greatly grow.

The original idea of the Shabbat Candles was lighting the Shabbat's evening dinner. Lightning in both ways - physically and spiritually. Some times I think that the material reason in not relevant anymore. Everyone has lights in their houses, so why the candles?

Until the last Shabbat. The lights went out in the middle of the evening's dinner. My wife was mad at me because I adjusted the Shabbat clock to shut down the light too early. The candles saved our dinner (and my skin...).
So maybe the candles are not so irrelevant after all.

This may look as a simple task but it isn't, especially when I can't connect to the Internet because I'm working on an intranet which is not conneted to the web.
The most simple way is to look for an application that does that (I've been told that there are some) but again - I don't have access to the web.

An interesting workaround I found is to save the document as a complete web site (not only plain html). This will create a directory with all the images and stuff with the original html file. You can find all the images you need in this directory.

Important Note: When saving, go to the Tools menu (Save As -> Tools -> Web Options -> Pictures) and there increase the resolution of the saves images, if needed.
This tip is relevant for Word 97 and further.