Time Dimension Creation

One of the cool new things about Analysis Services in SQL 2005 is the ability to define your time dimension from a wizard.
In BIDS you just enter what dates from and to, if you want a Fiscal Calendar and then what levels
e.g. Days > Weeks > Months > Years or Months > Quarters > Half Year > Years
It will create the hierarchy for you in AS but the really cool thing is that you can then push that information back to your SQL database. The Schema update wizard will create and populate a table in SQL for you containing all the information from the wizard.
Nothing to stop you then using this new tabe to create your time hierarchies in TM1 using Turbo Integrator......

TM1 9.1 SP2

This has been released this week and contains 2 important things I think.

1. The feeder issue in 9.1 sp1 where if you used curly brackets {} in your feeders then only the first element would feed; has been fixed.

2. There is a new function available called TM1User
e.g. =TM1User("sdata")
Should be cool for all sorts of things for tracking and helping users.

Watch out for this tech bulletin though explaining how any computer you try installing V9.1 SP2 will need to have Adobe acrobat on it in order to install successfully

http://www.applix.com/support/documentation.asp?docid=1542

Gannt Charts off TM1

I recently got asked to do some projects reporting in TM1.
One report they needed was a Gannt chart of the various stages each Project was at
e.g.
Start, Design, Implement, Finsh
So what I did was store the dates in TM1 so that the PMs could update them, do a DBRW in Excel to fetch the dates, then a days360() excel formula to calculate the number of days between each phase.
Once I had this data I then used the methods outlined in this article to produce a bar chart showing each of the 4 stages.
Who needs microsoft project ;-)

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/GanttChart.html

Business Objects Labs

Business Objects has a cool site where they introduce potential future products/add-ons

http://labs.businessobjects.com/

I'd love to see something similar from Applix. Allow the engineers to think out the box, post it for people to try and get feedback from them.

online file storage

Sometimes I find myself in the position where I have forgotten my usb drive but really need to get a copy of the TM1 database to review later.
In this situation I find http://www.omnidrive.com/ a great alternative.
You can get a free account with 2GB of storage, more than enough space to store a zipped copy of your TM1 database to access from another location i.e. when you get home.

HR Cubes

When doing detailed bottom up budgeting, people like to be able to budget for staff individually per department. There is often a difference between the level of departments that a person can see for GL purposes and what they can see for HR budgeting.

e.g. an accountant may be able to see the whole department structure for GL but should only budget for one department when it comes to budgeting salary costs per person.

I find the best architecture is to build the HR cube with a separate dimension called HR_Department. This dimension is a direct replica of the normal Department dimension but it can have entirely separate security applied to it

Now its just a case of creating some extra groups to handle clients access to the HR_Departments.