Hi Gurus,

I'm new to BI and MSAS and I desperately need your expert guidance.

I've read the MSAS Tutorial and have created a couple of cubes for
different business situations. Now I want the users to play around
(rather, feel the real benefits of OLAP services) with the cubes. So,
please suggest me some good client tools that go well with MSAS. I've
read (in this Discussion Group) a couple of names like ProClarity,
Panorama etc.

a) Kindly let me know if I can obtain the (downloadble) Trial version
of any of these client tools so that I can evaluate and experience the
features.

b) I've read that Excel too is also an excellent client tool. But
there's not much documentation provided, to the best of my knowledge,
by MS with the AS tutorial. Please do suggest me if there's any online
documentation that I can go through.

Thanks for your time and valuable suggestions. Please do keep these
discussions going. Its a pleasant surprise for me (and many newbies)
to land up on this site.

Best Regards,

Hi,

Please visit our website www.gmsbv.nl for more info, demos, try & buy
of the best OLAP frontends and platforms.

Regards,
Marco

bi_explorer9 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com (bi_explorer) wrote in message news:<583d31f5.0404170533.1c8c38ed (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>...

Hello,

you will find a download area at most of the vendor's web sites like
ProClarity, XLCubed, etc. Some just require you to register.

Excel is the preferred client tool for some users, mainly controllers or
marketing or sales analysts. Some vendors provide Excel plugins which can
also be downloaded (www.misag.com). Microsoft will also provide extended
OLAP functionality for Excel soon which will be made available for the
latest versions of Office (I think XP and 2003). With release of this add-in
it might be interesting to see whether a separate client add-in from a
third party vendor is still worth the investment. To use plain Excel just
open Excel and create a new pivot table.

Before selecting for a client tool be sure to gather the requirements from
your users (analysts, report users, etc.) since I haven't found many client
sides where one tool met all the requirements.

Kind regards,

Joerg

Joerg,

The 3 major Excel Add-in vendors (IA, MIS & XLCubed) are each
extending the reach of their Excel Add-ins such that when the Office
Solutions Accelerator add-in comes out it is going to have stiff
competition. Each of them will allow integration with reporting
services and web based publishing in one shape or another.

The most significant element of the competition is in my view going to
be performance and real flexibility plus extensibility to a real thin
client web environment.

I have talked to a number of vendors/customers and industry analysts
about the OSA and whilst the microsoft add-in potential pricing might
provide an alternative at potentially low cost the general view was
that for our niche market it was good as it legitmises what we do
rather than have the current "just use pivot table" debate.

Its absolutely true that we will each have to be a lot better than the
microsoft add-in as my guess is it will be giveaway to a lot of
customers but my bet is that when customers download and play with the
products they will make the best ROI choice for their particular
solution. Some of the excel add-ins are not expensive and when you
compare man hours savings then the numbers can and will stack up.

One thing is for sure so long as there remains a market then the
consumer will benefit as competition is good.

I'm really looking forward for the OSA to be in the public domain such
that we can have a reasoned debate over cost/benefit. Its not easy to
build these add-ins particularly to get good performance and
flexibility . If you couple in the need to support older versions of
Excel (97 and upwards as amazingly many companies still use 97) then
I'm optimistic.

It will be very interesting to see the state of this market in 12
months time !


Thanks

Mark Scanlon
XLCubed

Joerg Narr wrote:

By the way, it's a bit hidden, but Excel already does some kind of
minimalistic OLAP beyond pivot tables: Just import data using a query on
a data source. In a step of the wizard you'll be asked if you wish to
create a new Excel-OLAP-query.

Kind regards, Markus


--
http://reauktion.de/archer/