Installing Business Scorecard Manager

During the past 2 weeks, one of the technologies I've been fiddling with has been Microsoft's Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) 2005. I went on a 2-day training course last week, picked up an evaluation copy and started playing. Here are some notes on how to install BSM and create your first scorecard.

Installation

Can be fussy, especially when installing with SQL Server 2005. You will need to download and install PTSLite.exe to pass the OLEDB provider requirement, along with ADOMD.NET and MSXML4 (SQL Svr 2005 is up to MSXML 6). For the sensible souls who actually do read manuals, the readme file included on the CD does explain all this - it's the first link that appears when you install the CD, ignore it at your peril...

Make sure SharePoint is already installed and the virtual server extended. Because I was building a demo, I left SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) on the default WMDSE database but most installations would put SPS on SQL Server. When checking Google for blogs on BSM, I came across one (here) that suggests you cannot install SPS with SQL Server 2005 Developer edition.

Once that's all done, installing the Builder and Scorecard should be straightforward. My installation failed the hardware requirements test (although the machine meets the system requirements listed for BSM), but it doesn't prevent you from installing. Any other failures (that will occur if you don't get OLEDB and friends installed first) will prevent you from continuing the installation.

Setting up a scorecard

To get a very basic scorecard published... (the following assumes you have some familiarity with the BSM Builder tool... which could be quite an assumption, because the UI isn't as intuitive as it could be.)

• In SharePoint (Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Portal Server), create a site where the scorecard will be published to
• Open up BSM Builder and create a new workspace.
• Create an indicator (new definition), select 3 levels. Edit it and assign an image (traffic light) for each of 3 values (red, amber, green) - images are available with the sample folder that is installed with BSM. Publish indicator to server
• Create a KPI and give it a fixed value (actual & target). Edit the target and assign the indicator you just created. Publish KPI to server
• Create another 2 KPIs that would be subs to the first one (e.g. first one = profit, second one = profit value, third one = profit margin)
• Create a scorecard. Add the KPIs to it (add all 3, then indent the two sub-KPIs under the main one by clicking the arrow in the toolbar). Edit the default scorecard view, and add in the columns (actual and target) for the KPI. Publish scorecard to server
• Deploy scorecard to SharePoint. You will be prompted to enter a page name - call it anything (it will create a web part page for the scorecard). You will then be prompted to connect to SharePoint - enter URL of the site created. You'll need to also select a library - the default 'shared documents' will do
• Hey presto, one scorecard published and deployed.

To go beyond basic, create a data source to use instead of entering fixed values. For a simple scorecard, use ODBC and connect to an Excel spreadsheet (see below for a sample connection string). For more advanced scorecards, you will be connecting to one or more databases. For more advanced filtering capabilities (i.e. multi-dimensional), use ADOMD.NET to connect to an OLAP cube.

Sample Excel connection string: (replace c:\test.xls with your actual filename)

Driver={Microsoft Excel Driver (*.xls)};DBQ=c:\test.xls;ReadOnly=True;

This string didn't work with folders (i.e. file needs to be in root of drive) so there is probably a better one to use, but it does the job for building a simple demo.

This information and other bits and bobs are posted on the web site here.