TM1 9.1 SP1

Version 9.1 is fully released now and available for general download.
Note that this is an SP1 release already so any major bugs should all be sorted.

My favourite features are:

- The new locking model
- Indentation on the cube viewer
- New rules editor

and the new dotnet api which contains functions for doing mdx results without using adomd. Something I've already utilised and think will be really useful for other people

Microcharts on TM1 Data

Check out this picture of an Excel dashboard, created using Microcharts, running off the sdata TM1 server.

You can download this file and examples from other olap servers here:

http://www.bonavistasystems.com/Download2/Dashboards%20for%20OLAP.zip

Security Rules

If you write rules on your TM1 security cubes be careful they don't become invalid.
e.g. You write a rule for a specific security group to have read permissions but 6 months later you decide to delete that group.

If you don't delete that rule the next time your server re-starts, it will find that rule file to be invalid and not apply any rules, thus you risk security profiles not working until the rule file is updated.

Excel Iterations problem

I recently had an issue where a TM1 report would not work.
After looking closer I found it would not run the vba code Activecell.Calculate
After a bit of playing around I found that if I turned off
Tools > Options > Calculation > Iterations
everything would work as normal.
Personally I have never found a use for iterations in TM1 reporting and I think its worth turning offon any TM1 excel report.

Oracle buys Hyperion

Well this is going to shake things up!
Microsoft has Performancepoint coming out soon so it seems Oracle has responded by buying big.
I presume Essbase will become the MOLAP server of Oracle/Peoplesoft databases but it surely will take some time to integrate it all together.
TM1 may very well benefit from all this.

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSN2824699920070301

TM1 9.1

There seems to be some confusion about the release of version 9.1
To my knowledge documentation is available for download but the official software will not be available until the end of March

Automatically load TM1

If you want to ensure that when a user loads an Excel report that TM1 is loaded, you can add the tm1p.xla as a reference to that file.
That way Excel will always check TM1 is loaded.
In the VBA go Tools > References > Browse
and browse to where tm1p.xla is installed.
This will then appear as a reference in your project.
Save the file, close down excel and open that file.
The file will load tm1 automatically.