Understanding Dashboard Designer

A key to understanding PerformancePoint Services is to know how to use Dashboard Designer. Dashboard Designer is the client interface for building PerformancePoint reports and scorecards. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for creating the dashboards, scorecards, reports, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that bring a company’s business intelligence and analytical metrics to life. Equally significant is that it enables business users to build reports without having to do any programming.

Many veterans of SharePoint are familiar with SharePoint Designer as one of the tools that enables power users to create SharePoint sites. Dashboard Designer can be thought of as the SharePoint Designer of the PerformancePoint world. However, unlike SharePoint Designer, which is not required for creating and setting up SharePoint sites, Dashboard Designer is a necessary component to creating PerformancePoint dashboards.

You can launch Dashboard Designer from two places. The first method is to complete the following steps:

1. Go to the SharePoint site built from the Business Intelligence Center site template in the previous section. The URL should be http://servername:portnumber/sites/ PPSSample/.
2. Click the PPS Sample link in the main navigation.
3. From this page, click the Run Dashboard Designer button, shown in Figure 30.3, and the executable will download and run.

   Figure 30.3. BI Center page with Run Dashboard Designer button.

   

After running Dashboard Designer for the first time, a menu option will be added to the Programs menu on the local desktop in a Programs group called SharePoint. Thus, all future designing sessions can be launched from the desktop. However, it should be noted that no application is actually stored on the desktop, because the shortcut that is added to the Programs menu actually points to the executable that lives on the SharePoint 2010 server.

It is helpful to understand the four main components of Dashboard Designer: the Office button, the Office Ribbon, the Workspace Browser, and the working area, as shown in Figure 30.4.

• File button— Dashboard Designer contains the File button in the upper-left corner. Clicking this button reveals the usual menu options for New, Open, Save, and Close and provides access to a button at the bottom to set specific Designer Options.

• Dashboard Designer Ribbon— Also like other Office 2007/2010 products, Dashboard Designer contains the Ribbon interface across the top, as shown in Figure 30.4. Ribbon options include Home, Edit, and Create.

• The Home Ribbon— Allows for operations such as Cut/Copy/Paste, Adding Items and Lists from the SharePoint server to the workspace, and a Delete button to remove items from the server and workspace. There are also a few buttons for comparing server and workspace versions of components. The Home Ribbon also contains an Import button that allows for pulling items from one workspace into a new SharePoint site.

Figure 30.4. Dashboard Designer with AdventureWorks Data connections.

• The Edit Ribbon— Provides the ability to apply bulk changes to several items at once.

• The Create Ribbon— Contains icons to instantiate each of the different PPS components that make up a PerformancePoint dashboard. Each of these components will be discussed in more detail.

• Workspace Browser— The Workspace Browser, displayed along the left sidebar of Dashboard Designer, shows all the components in use in the current workspace. The Workspace Browser is divided into two groupings. Data Connections are the different sources of data that will determine how the visuals are displayed. PerformancePoint Content, the second grouping, lists the various visual elements used by the workspace.

• Working area— The last section of Dashboard Designer is the working area, which consumes the majority of the Dashboard Designer window. The working area displays two different views: SharePoint and Workspace. As you create new components, copies are stored on both the local computer and the SharePoint Server.

The local, or workspace, versions are bundled together and saved to a local file with a .ddwx extension. The server components are stored in a SharePoint site in a PerformancePoint Content list.

As you browse through Dashboard Designer, notice a pair of tabs in the PerformancePoint Content section for SharePoint and Workspace, as shown in Figure 30.5. The SharePoint tab lists all the content currently stored in the linked SharePoint site. The Workspace tab shows the items that are utilized in the current workspace.

Figure 30.5. Dashboard Designer showing Data Connections for the SharePoint tab.

The reason for having both a local and a server copy of the various PPS components is that multiple individuals or departments may use some common KPIs but would be interested in seeing the data grouped together in many different ways. This fits into the notion of PerformancePoint Server providing a framework where individuals and teams can easily build the reports of interest to them.

Consider, for example, shoe sales based on both brand and region, where there are four different geographic regions and six unique brands. Factoring in both brand and region, there are 24 unique combinations of measurements. A brand manager may be interested in seeing just the four KPIs derived from his brand. The manager of the east region, on the other hand, may be interested in all six brands, but only how they sold within the East region. Although the same figures are being measured, they each have their own set of measurements that they want to monitor. Having the components stored on the server enables reuse of commonly used items, whereas having the workspace copies for individuals to consume prevents the clutter of unwanted components.

Additionally, storing PerformancePoint content in a central SharePoint list allows for many of the same benefits offered by other SharePoint lists. Approval routing, categorization based on metadata, and the application of security to various components are all standard functionality provided to PerformancePoint content.