What's new for Excel add-in in PPS SP1

Peter Eb. has excelent post in Technet forums regarding SP1 improvements for Excel add-in:

"Here's a quick highlight of the changes our team made in SP1 to improve performance. The main scenarios addressed are "matrix rendering/what-if" and "assignment opening".

1. There is an option to clear the changelist after submission per form. This is for scenarios where large volumes of data are submitted at once, and there is no risk of validation errors. (avoids having the contributor clear the cache manually) This is also useful for long running assignments that may accumulate a large number of cells changed over multiple submissions
2. There is an option to turn off what-if per matrix. This is for scenarios where multiple matrices are being used that reference the writeback model, but might not have aggregated values that are affected by the what-if. (note this is also handy for shares input cases, where the value cannot be what-if'd by Analysis Services)
3. Formula handling. The formula scan is now much more efficient and the matching of formulas to the mdx location is also vastly improved.
4. Auto-recalc. For data entry scenarios when auto-recalc is enabled (remember spreading forces this mode on) we determined that most times the matrix is statically sized. (aka no grow/shrink). So in this case the addin just renders the data grid, formatting and the row/column headers are not touched. It's not quite Excel calculation fast, but definitely for smaller matrices the experience is much improved for contributors.


Mainly assignment opening benefits from the rendering improvements. But specifically in some scenarios the clear changelist after submission is a useful new option. There are some other changes as well (like the where clause change I've talked about frequently), but I think these are the visible changes that have not yet been identified. (I'll go back over the changes later and provide more details if I missed anything)

Some informal (but real world) feedback from internal deployments and some preview customers tell us that common refresh/what-if operations in SP1 are 50% of the time in RTM or better. In one extreme case which could take advantage of the option to turn of what-if the time was even 5%, but I don't think that will be typical. Opening assignments sounds like SP1 is 50% to 33% of the RTM time. So far I haven't seen any negative performance feedback, knock wood, cross fingers, and any other anti-jinx superstitions.

I can't guarantee that those performance numbers will match your customers experience, but am optimistic that formula users and spreading users will see improvements. (Localized builds will follow and will see the same perf. improvements)"

You can find complete discussion on:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3445168&SiteID=17

PPS SP1 Released

Altough I'm late with the announcement, it's important to notice - Microsoft released PPS SP1!
Here is what's new..

What's New for PerformancePoint Planning Server SP1

• Windows Server 2008 Support
• Excel add-in Performance Improvements - The Performance of opening reports and opening and refreshing workflow assignments is improved significantly.
• New workbook option Clear Changes after workflow action - When you set this option to True, it automatically clears any changes after the workflow action occurs when the form is used in an assignment. This improves performance of subsequent queries. However, if submission fails with this option set the user will be unable to resubmit the changes and the changes will be lost.
• New workbook option Enable what-if analysis - When you set this option to True for a matrix, the add-in automatically performs what-if calculations that show the effect the change will have on an assignment if submitted. If False, no changes are applied to the matrix, this can help improve query performance.
• Annotations - Forms and Reports can now be created for models that have annotations disabled.)
• Workflow Assignments - Contributors can now use the discard action after submitting an assignment to clear the version of the form template they recently submitted allowing the most recently published version of the form template to be retrieved.
• User Dimension - Allows creation of dimension properties that link to the user dimension.
• Kerberos Support - The PPS Planning Service can now reside on the same IIS server as other IIS sites that also require Kerberos authentication.
• Data Import Wizard is decoupled from Microsoft Dynamics AX and works with any data provider - The data import wizard is now a generic data integration wizard that allows customers and partners to develop their own data providers to integrate source financial data. The PerformancePoint Server Data Integration Toolkit, provided by Microsoft, is a companion tool that provides a data integration framework. You can use this framework to create your own data providers.

What's New for PerformancePoint Monitoring Server SP1

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Support
• Default Display Conditions can be Created - It is now possible to add a default display condition report view (see related blog post also posted today)
• Multi-select Filter Enhancements - Multi-select Monitoring server filters now pass to multi-select SQL Server Reporting Services report parameters and Strategy Map views
• Time Intelligence Post Filter formula date corrections
o In some instances filters were passing a one day offset, this is resolved
o Date format of filter will now honor localized formats
• Negative numbers will not cause a text wrap in scorecards
• Dashboard filter performance improvements
• Expand/collapse functions work properly with hidden parent KPI members
• Tabular filter enhancements
• Limit of 1,000 characters in an MDX expression for KPIs has been removed
• No longer blocked from using SQL Server 2008 as a data source (NOTE: full support for 2008 is coming in SP2, we just won't prevent you from running on it with SP1)

You can download them from the following locations:

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (x86): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=28B1F86B-B7F2-4215-8BC9-8F8507FF8831&displaylang=en

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (x64): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6245C354-9191-4C4D-8C0C-C10D6C778AF8&displaylang=en

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Version (x86): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6372C24F-67DD-42DD-B034-748907B23420&displaylang=en

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Version (x64): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3ADAC793-DEF0-4BA8-A9AB-228979B8DB40&displaylang=en