Executing a SSIS Package from SharePoint 2010

March 27, 2012 1 Comment

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig

Marek Koenig specializes in Business Intelligence, SharePoint & Custom Development.

In this post I will talk about how you can create a SharePoint list that will kick off SSIS packages. This interface will allow certain end users to have some access to package execution;  it is much cleaner than having a business user log into a database to manually kick off a job.

Creating the SQL table
The package execution history will be stored in a simple table comprising of two columns: PackageName and LastExecuted.

The table

If the user wants to rerun a specific package they will zero out the LastExecuted column. Doing so will kick off a trigger that executes sp_start_job. Below you will find the syntax for the trigger. Read more of this post

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What Makes Good Business Intelligence Software?

December 7, 2011 1 Comment

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig specializes in Business Intelligence, SharePoint & Custom Development.

With the amount of data within an organization growing by the minute, it can be challenging to make sense of it all. A data analyst may have a good understanding of what is really going on, but would a C-level employee be able to do the same? It all depends on the set of business intelligence (BI) tools being used.

The goal of a BI tool should be to quickly provide meaningful insights into your data. This can be done by extracting, manipulating, enriching, and extrapolating on various data points. A good piece of software will meet certain expectations (some of which we’ll explore below). Read more of this post

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A Better ERD

September 14, 2011 2 Comments

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig specializes in Business Intelligence, SharePoint & Custom Development.

The problem that I have with big Data Warehouse projects, is that it’s somewhat difficult to document the system in a useful way. I’m sure everyone has seen an entity-relationship diagram (ERD) before, and there are some definite usages for them. Read more of this post

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The Mysteries Behind Aligning Visio Images

February 27, 2011 Leave a comment

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig specializes in Business Intelligence, SharePoint & Custom Development.

A colleague of mine recently reminded me of an issue I ran into when building out a dashboard with Visio. He was having issues aligning Visio charts with other web parts; It appeared that when a Visio web part was used on a page, it would have an arbitrary amount of canvas space around the image. He had seemingly tried everything, except for starting over.

I had this exact same issue, and it almost drove me mad figuring out what I could do to fix it. I attempted to change several properties on the web part itself, such as: Overriding the Web Drawing’s default initial view; disabling zooming; and, disabling panning. Then just for the heck of it, I open up Visio itself and think I might have some luck there.

First things first, I save the file. To my surprise the canvas area changes once again, but this time it at least looks a little bit familiar. I switch back to Visio and I notice that layout in the web part matches exactly the layout in Visio. It seems that the vdw holds onto some view state information. This makes no sense to me, but I test out my hypothesis by scrolling up in Visio and Read more of this post

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Master / Detail Report

January 5, 2011 Leave a comment

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig specializes in Business Intelligence, SharePoint & Custom Development.

I’ve always had a difficult time creating a good master / detail report. The biggest problem has been remembering the solution that came out of the trials and tribulations I went through the time before. My train of thought goes through the same varied iterations every time.

I always start off with a single report and two separate tables. This idea works but I can’t dynamically change the parameter of the detail. Then I try using a sub-report, also works but–yet again–I can’t send parameters using a click. Every time, same steps, same frustration.

Then it dawns on me, why not use two separate reports on a single SharePoint page? With that layout a user can click on a part of a chart and it will filter the detail report through a URL query string. Snazzy.

The solution is pretty simple to implement and will allow you to build a quick, interactive dashboard. You may ask yourself: Read more of this post

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Integrating Visio Services with Excel Services using SharePoint

November 8, 2010 2 Comments

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig specializes in Business Intelligence, SharePoint & Custom Development.

Microsoft has tightly integrated the latest releases of Visio Professional 2010 and Excel 2010 into SharePoint.  With this integration, you can do some pretty nifty things with these tools without writing a single a line of code.  The end goal is to have a set of data linked graphics drive Excel chart selection.

For this example we’ll be using our internally created Crossbone brand; Crossbone Brands is a fictitious lifestyle products company that specializes in creating products that appeal to extreme sports enthusiasts.

In the Visio section we will see three of our snowboards that we have for purchase with their respective sales broken up by board length.  A user will select a board and this will then change the Excel chart showing off the yearly sales broken down by month. Let’s get to coding designing.

The Images

The first step will be to get three images that you want to use and add them to your Visio canvas.  After that, click each image by itself and Read more of this post

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