Creating dashboards in Sharepoint 2010 – Tutorial

Creating Dashboards – II
To create a dashboards in SharePoint 2010, you would use the newly integrated part of the SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise called PerformancePoint. PerformancePoint Services is a performance management service that you can use to monitor and analyze your business or you can say that, PerformancePoint Services is Microsoft’s dashboard delivery tool, which now is part of the SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise platform. PerformancePoint Services enables you to create rich, context-driven dashboards that aggregate data and content to provide a complete view of how your business is performing at all levels.

When do you use Performance Point Services?

• When you want to use Context-driven Dashboards across system.
• You need Transparency & accountability.
• You need to Create KPI from different sources.
• You use Performance Point Services when you need Multi-dimensional analysis for root cause.

What will PerformancePoint give me?

It provides you with flexible and easy-to-use tools for building Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Scorecards, Analytic Charts and Grids, Reports, Filters and Dashboards.

Each of these components are unique to PerformancePoint Services and provide functionality that interacts with a server component that handles the hard parts like data connectivity and security.

What is PerformancePoint Service application -

As you know that In SharePoint Server 2010 services are no longer contained within a Shared Service Provider (SSP) instead you can create a service application for each service and can share them with various existing web applications. To understand better, PerformancePoint Services will be one of the Service that will stay in the application server with a database something like “PerformancePoint Services Service database” in the Sql server box.

What is Secure Store Service: - This service application stores the password for the PerformancePoint Services unattended account.

What are the Features of PerformancePoint Services –

* With PerformancePoint Services, the dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. The new architecture also takes advantage of SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities.

* The Decomposition Tree is a new visualization report type available in PerformancePoint Services. You can use it to quickly and visually break down higher-level data values from a multi-dimensional data set to understand the driving forces behind those values. The Decomposition Tree is available in scorecards and analytic reports and ultimately in dashboards.

* You can access more detailed business information with improved scorecards. Scorecards have been enhanced to make it easy for you to drill down and quickly access more detailed information. PerformancePoint scorecards also offer more flexible layout options, dynamic hierarchies, and calculated KPI features.

* Better Time Intelligence filtering capabilities that you can use to create and use dynamic time filters that are always up to date. Other improved filters improve the ability for dashboard users to quickly focus in on information that is most relevant.

* Ability to include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts together with other PerformancePoint Services Web parts on the same page.

* Easier to author and publish dashboard items by using Dashboard Designer.

* The KPI Details report is a new report type that displays contextually relevant information about KPIs, metrics, rows, columns, and cells within a scorecard. The KPI Details report works as a Web part that links to a scorecard or individual KPI to show relevant metadata to the end user in SharePoint Server.

* Create analytics reports to better understand underlying business forces behind the results. Analytic reports have been enhanced to support value filtering, new chart types, and server-based conditional formatting.

What is this Dashboard Designer ?

PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer is the design tool you will use to build key performance indicators (KPIs), indicators, scorecards, reports, filters, data sources, and dashboards. It also enables you to deploy your finished dashboards to SharePoint.

Prerequisites for creating dashboards –

1. Activate the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature. PerformancePoint Services uses this feature to perform dashboard publishing.

2. Activate PerformancePoint Services Site Collection Features feature. This feature adds PerformancePoint content types and a Business Intelligence Center site template.

3. Activate the SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection Features feature. This feature enables Excel Services, Visio Services, and Access Services, included in the SharePoint Server Enterprise License.

4. Create a new Business Intelligence Center site by clicking Site Actions ➪ New Site, and then choose Business Intelligence template.

5. Create an Unattended Service Account.

In PerformancePoint Services, you create the unattended account directly in the PerformancePoint Services application settings.
In this case, the password is stored in Secure Store Service and the actual username is stored in the PerformancePoint Services database.

An unattended account can be created using the following steps:
1. Browse to the Central Administration Site.
2. From the Application Management category, choose Manage service applications.
3. From the list of existing service applications, click PerformancePoint Service Application.
4. Click the PerformancePoint Service Application Settings link.
5. Specify the unattended service account for PerformancePoint and click OK.

In the Next post we will look at How to create a Dashboard and a ScoreCard.

Also Read : Types of Datasources for Creating Dashboards

Create dashboard with SharePoint List

Create dashboard with SQL datasource

Update - Need help with PerformancePoint Services? Try PerformancePoint Services SuperFlows