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Migrating From ProClarity
History of ProClarity
From ProClarity Corporation’s brochure: “ProClarity Analytics 6 provides organizations with powerful yet
simple-to-use analysis tools to cover everything ranging from ad-hoc querying to sophisticated analytic
modeling. The solution adapts to unique business and technical requirements while expanding the Microsoft
business intelligence (BI) platform with a simple data access solution for SQL Server Analysis Services 2000
and 2005.”
The product and company were very successful and led to the announcement of the acquisition of
ProClarity by Microsoft in April 2006. This marked a distinct statement of Microsoft’s intent to become a
major player in the Business Intelligence front end tools market, matching their already significant
dominance in the multi-dimensional database market with
SQLServer Analysis Services.
Unfortunately, while some of ProClarity’s capability was
preserved, it was migrated to a range of Microsoft tools and
spread out across Excel, SharePoint, and PerformancePoint
Server (now PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint), and the
product itself was deprecated and further development ceased.
While users were offered an upgrade path in terms of licensing
to PerformancePoint Server, there was no way to migrate
existing ProClarity Implementations, requiring a complete
rewrite and reimplementation.
Additionally, the free flowing, intuitive data browsing and
analysis offered by ProClarity and very popular with users, was not replicated and to this day remains a gap
in Microsoft’s BI product capabilities.
Current ProClarity Status
Active support for ProClarity 6.3 SP3, the last incarnation of the product, ceased in July 2012. This means
that while the core product is now on Passive Support, which means that bugs internal to the product will
be fixed, any changes made to the hosting environment (i.e. Windows Server) that might render ProClarity
unusable or incompatible, will not be addressed.
“Unfortunately, while some
of ProClarity’s capability
was preserved, it was
migrated to a range of
Microsoft tools and spread
out across Excel,
SharePoint, and
PerformancePoint Server”
This places at risk a large number of still extant ProClarity installations where users are still enjoying the
functionality and features of ProClarity and where is capabilities are still being used in understanding the
performance of businesses running it.
With the last update of ProClarity 6.3 (SP3) released in October 2009, it is already somewhat of an art to
install and operate ProClarity in today’s 64 bit server and workstation operating systems. Indeed, there is no
native 64 bit version of ProClarity available. Similarly there is a growing incompatibility with today’s
browsers for those using the Web Standard or Web Professional versions.
Having said all this, there is still a strong and loyal user base of ProClarity. Organisations trying to replace it
with other tools face a strong resistance from ProClarity users, who find the replacement tools more difficult
to use and often with significantly reduced functionality.
The ideal solution would be to find a product that provided the same level (or better) of functionality, with a
similar approach to data analysis to preserve user knowledge and training and that would allow the
migration of ProClarity reports, views and analyses without any significant investment of time and expertise.
BI Office Overview
BI Office has been designed and optimized with a number of key objectives in mind:
Inspired by ProClarity – Build upon the capabilities, approach and usability of ProClarity, whilst
updating its User Interface and Architecture to the 21st Century.
High performing, scalable Thin Client OLAP viewer – Learn the lessons of the past ten years to
address the larger scale of users and data.
Intuitive yet sophisticated analytics – Easy migration from ProClarity, yet a shallow learning curve for
new users to take them from simple reports and views to sophisticated analytics.
Seamless dashboard integration – Provide a simple but powerful paradigm for users to create their
own dashboards, bringing together views and charts that are central to their performance
monitoring.
Integrated Enterprise Reporting – An easy way for users to create parameter driven, dynamic text,
high fidelity electronic documents (PDF, word, XPS) that may be scheduled and distributed
automatically to large user populations.
Enterprise focused solution – Make it easy to install and deploy across large organisations, with
features that allow easy migration from Development to User Acceptance Testing to Production,
with full support for existing data and network security.
BI Office makes it easy to move both applications and users from the ProClarity environment to that of BI
Office. This comes with native 64 bit support, a distributed server architecture that allows redundancy and
scale out across multiple load balanced servers plus significant new analytic capability over and above that
offered by ProClarity.
Simple Steps to Preserve Your ProClarity Investment
Migrating from ProClarity to BI Office could not be simpler. BI Office will render all ProClarity layout choices
with only two exceptions, the Decomposition Tree, because Microsoft owns the patent on this and Pyramid
Analytics cannot legally replicate it and Perspective Views, because BI Office significantly extends the
capability of these and simply requires a small change to the presentation chart (select Scatter Plot). In both
cases Pyramid will execute the defined data query and present the data for the user to decide how to best
display it.
BI Office will preserve all other ProClarity settings, chart and grid layouts, row and column dimension and
member selections, slicers, filters and sorts. It will even import calculated members and custom sets,
replicating them inside of BI Office.
From ProClarity Analytics Server (PAS)
If you are using ProClarity
Analytics Server (PAS), then all
that is required is to provide
the Pyramid Server with access
to the PAS content store.
Pyramid users (defined in the
same way as ProClarity by
integrating with Active
Directory) can access their
ProClarity content directly,
without any migration effort
whatsoever. Figure 1 shows
the BI Office Administration
console settings to allow BI
Office to read the PAS content
store. This is all that is
required. ProClarity content is
shown under the “Legacy”
folder, with all PAS folder security preserved. BI Office will read the book and report definitions from the
PAS content Store and render them faithfully in BI Office. If users then save their books in Pyramid, they will
be written to the Pyramid Content store and conversion is done. Figure 2 shows the ProClarity Content
under the Legacy folder.
Figure 1. PAS settings in the BI Office Administration Console. This is all that is required to enable PAS content to BI Office Users
Figure 2. . Accessing ProClarity Books and Reports through the BI Office "Legacy Content" Folder. All user security on ProClarity Folders and Books is preserved.
Figure 3. View from ProClarity (Web Professional) and from BI Office of the exact same PAS book. Note that BI Office allows multiple views to be open simultaneously and the use of the Accounting Grid formatting in BI Office.
From ProClarity Desktop Professional
If PAS is not installed and the ProClarity Desktop Professional is being used with users saving their
ProClarity Briefing Books (BBKs) locally or to a file server, then BI Office provides a BBK import capability as
part of its “Backstage” functionality.
There are two steps involved in this case:
1. The user opens their briefing book and saves it in XML format.
2. The user then imports the briefing book into their personal BI Office folder
Figure 4. Importing local ProClarity Briefing Books. Local BBKs end up in the user’s personal BI Office folder, allowing users to migrate their own content without involvement of IT
Continuity in the User Experience
One of the major benefits of the Pyramid Analytics approach is that there is no significant resistance to the
upgrade / migration from your ProClarity users. The look and feel of BI Office, whilst updated to reflect the
Microsoft Office 2010 UI, remains essentially the same as ProClarity and users will feel instantly at home.
This preserves investment in training and user knowledge and creates virtually zero impact on productivity
and effectiveness.
This has been amply demonstrated in end user installations. A recent upgrade for a City of London based
insurance firm saw an elapsed time of forty five minutes from the arrival of the Pyramid Analytics technician
to install BI Office, to their users working in BI Office with their existing PAS content.
Summary
ProClarity offered probably the best front end user tools for Analysis Services during its lifetime. This was
reflected in the number of their customers (over 2,000 companies around the world) and the loyalty of its
user base.
With the acquisition and subsequent deprecation of the product by Microsoft and the lack of provision of a
replacement or easy migration path, these loyal users have been left with no way forward.
BI Office has picked up the ProClarity mantle, providing a continuity of user experience coupled with the
architecture and robustness required for large scale, enterprise deployments.
Figure 5. Using imported ProClarity content in bioWRITER to produce high quality PDF reports for distribution.
PYRAMID ANALYTICS
the.freedom.to.question.answer.act
BI Office integrated analytics, dashboards and reporting
PyramidAnalytics.com info@pyramidanalytics.com bioXL, bioPoint, bioWriter, bioMiner and BI Office are registered trademarks of Pyramid Analytics.
ProClarity and PowerPoint are registered trademarks of Microsoft.
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