Hello,

I'm a software developer with 2 weeks experience. I would really be grateful
for any advice/suggestions anyone can offer.

I work for a very small software company. Our customers are NOT techies,
they are small business owners who use our software to run their business.
Most of them do not have any IT people. Our software uses a MS SQL Server
backend with 250 tables. All of our customers have the same database
structure, since they're using our software. Our customers are small (read
'Mom & Pop') and cannot afford high-end analysis & reporting tools, nor can
we.

I am building cubes (using MS Analysis Services), which we ultimately want
to distribute to our customers so they can analyze their data better. I need
a way to easily distribute the cubes to our customers so that they can
brainlessly install them & use them to analyze data & generate reports.

How can I automate this process of distributing cubes to them to make it
easy for them to install them & view data & create reports?

(Also, I tried to open a cube with Crystal Reports v8.5 with no luck.)

Please help if you can. Any suggestions will be much appreciated.

Greg

Will the functionality of local cubes suffice for your customers, since
they can be distributed as files and accessed via Excel? Here's an
article explaining them:

http://www.informit.com/articles/art...=29880&redir=1
Creating a Local Cube with Office 2000

Make your OLAP Data portable with Office 2000 for remote analysis! Join
Bill Pearson in creating a local cube, using two different hands-on
approaches: First, we'll create a local cube from an existing Excel
PivotTable report; then we'll explore a more design-oriented OLAP Cube
Wizard for more sophistication and flexibility.
...

- Deepak

Deepak Puri
Microsoft MVP - SQL Server

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Hi Deepak,

First, thanks for your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

I'm not sure whether that idea will work or not, but I will certainly
explore it.

What I am looking into right now is building an installation program with
InstallShield, which will make it very easy for the customer to install the
OLAP DB on their machine. In addition, I might be designing some Crystal
Reports which will be installed along with it.

I welcome any other suggestions or information.

Thanks again Deepak,

Greg Norris

"Deepak Puri" wrote:

Yes tere is a program lake this. In the SQL dev kit is MetaData Scriptor.
Turn a Olap catalog into code to run in other machines.

"MissouriTiger" wrote:

Also the DSO/XML utility
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

--
Dave Wickert [MSFT]
dwickert (AT) online (DOT) microsoft.com
Program Manager
BI SystemsTeam
SQL BI Product Unit (Analysis Services)
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.


"MartinDS" <MartinDS (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote