Speaking the language of business intelligence with an Australian accent

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Windows 7 and PerformancePoint M&A Setup Gotcha

For those who have, or are about to, upgrade to Windows 7 and reinstall a local instance of PPS for the purposes of demos / experimentation / learning etc. here are a couple of quick tips on getting things up and running.

  1. Before installing the M&A Server be sure to read this post and ensure all your pre-reqs are in place.
  2. Install the latest hotfix (I understand that PPS SP3 coming out in a couple of days)

UPDATE: SP3 is now available so skip step 2 above and install SP3 instead

x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=90c596a5-aca4-4ded-9072-facf834bc0c6&displaylang=en

x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3ad75ae5-d2cd-4953-87cf-5f74d79804c6&displaylang=en

And now the Win7 twist. Once you have installed, configured the M&A server and fired up Dashboard Designer (DD) you receive the following message when trying to create a data source:

The requested item cannot be found. Verify that it exists and that you have access permissions.

OK, so this is an application pool account problem? Nope. The problem is you’re not an administrator on this Monitoring Server yet. So you go into the administrative section in DD and add your account. When you to the options section and try to administer the server you get this error:

You do not have Administrator privileges on the Monitoring Server ‘http://localhost:40000/WebService/PMService.axmx’. Contact your Monitoring Server Administrator.

And herein lies the problem. You’re not a monitoring server administrator yet, but how can you make yourself one if you can’t get into the admin screen?

The solution:

You need explicitly run Dashboard Designer as an administrator (“but I AM an administrator!”). By default you’re not running this application as an admin. This is related to the UAC settings in Win7. Sure you can alter (turn off) the UAC settings but you may not want to, or be allowed to, in some cases.

How do you run DD as an admin? The Start menu item that is created for DD is only a link to the ClickOnce launch URL so you won’t find the appropriate “Run as administrator” option on the context menu if you SHIFT + Right-click on it. In order to run DD as an administrator find the DD executable (PSCBuilder.exe) in the file system. On a default install it will be located in %Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\3.0\Monitoring\PPSMonitoring_1\DesignerInstall\3.0

Right-click the executable and “Run as administrator” from there.

RunAsAdmin

In this administrator instance of Dashboard Designer go into the Server Options section and add yourself as an administrator.

You should be good to go from there.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice tip Nick. By the way, this also works for Windows Server 2008. Thanks a bunch

DP from JA

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Ethan said...

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Jacob said...

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