As promised earlier this year, Senthil Raj – author of the celebrated Object Tracking Tool, has kindly agreed to merge his application with Metadata Browser.
After much coding and testing, time has come to unveil this brand new application, which you will surely find very useful. Click here to download it.
You can also download the manual here.
So, what’s new?
- Well, there’s obviously the new and more powerful than ever Object Tracker. You can use it both to extract a simple list of objects in your project, and to generate documentation such as format, alias, formula, dimensionality, transformation and condition for metrics; lookup table, forms, child & parent relationships for attributes, etc. It behaves more or less like the Project Documentation Wizard from Desktop, with the huge difference that you can actually run all sorts of analysis on the Excel files generated by Metadata Browser, and you simply can’t do it with the HTML files generated by Desktop.
- Another upgrade that you requested is the LDAP and NT authentication modes. They are now available at login.
- Talking about the connection window, Metadata Browser is now capable of reading the most recent username that you have used for a certain project, from the registry. This will make it easier for you to login.
Enjoy!
You know how, after you execute a report, every time you make a change to the Report Data Options the report gets re-executed in order to apply those changes?
Well, in version 9 (not sure about 9.01 yet) this doesn’t happen for the Metric Join Type and Attribute Join Type options. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature, though the behaviour appears to be intended by the developers. If someone from MicroStrategy is reading this, please provide some background details.
The downside of this is, of course, that if you are debugging a report by modifying one of those options, you might get the idea that your change had no effect whatsoever. This is because you were used with automatic re-execution after you pressed OK, as in the previous versions.
Over a year ago I put this link up. (LINK!!1!!). I just got a new comment on this post I thought worth sharing from “Someone MicroStrategy is REALLY trying to piss off” (that’s his/her name).
As to the search terms, when I’m evaluating a product for installation onto my company’s servers, I always google for productname sucks. I’ve found out more interesting bugs, shortcomings and little dirty secrets about quality of support or pricing gotchas that way than you’d apparently believe. Sure, the end user types that would use MicroStrategy are too uptight to use a word like sucks, but the IT people are the ones whose opinions I value. When it all comes down to dust, 90% of BI users are sales drones and beancounters that don’t truly have any valid perspective on evaluating software other than whether they think it looks pretty and whether or not it’s easy for them to use.
In terms of MicroStrategy, I’ll leave out the bulk of my story and just relate the one glaring WTF that is really pushing me to drop MicroStrategy from our number 1 BI candidate down well below several other companies. I called their support folks because their Linux demo VMWare appliance is built improperly and so it breaks when you try to do some things. In the process of attempting to get me sorted out, the tech I spoke to suggested that rather than using the IP address of the VM I put localhost into the address bar of my browser, and attempted to argue with me and tell me that it would get somewhere other than my own desktop PC. Any qualified IT person (and a good many power user end user types) know that localhost always, ALWAYS points to your local machine (at IP address 127.0.0.1 or the equivalent on your setup), and will almost never even send a single packet of data off your PC if you attempt to hit that address.
That might not seem like a problem to you, but that’s such a fundamental misunderstanding of network application troubleshooting that it really just blows my mind. I like to try to believe that the managers of a support department at a software company would be able to recognize that powerful of a lack of knowledge in their employees that they would know to either send them for training or put someone else on the job. Time and time again I’ve seen BI vendors with either an utter lack of concern for that sort of issue, or that are completely managed by the type of people who would be the end users of their product, who have absolutely zero technical competence or comprehension. As the person who has to install, setup and maintain whatever BI app I decide we’re going to use, it’s just amazing to me that these companies charge tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars (often yearly) for what is essentially a support contract.
I know MY company isn’t spending 5-6 figures on an app with support that poor. In this economy, you’d think they’d be concerned about that…
Valid points.
UPDATE: MicroStrategy Responds
First, I’d like to point out that it is very wise of you to consider technical support in your overall BI evaluation. Quality of technical support is a critical factor to success of any enterprise software deployment and one that is often not given appropriate consideration during the evaluation process. The fact is that the high quality of MicroStrategy’s Technical Support is consistently recognized by the top industry analysts (Gartner, BISurvey, Cindi Howson, etc) as a significant differentiator between MicroStrategy and other BI vendors.
That said, the interaction that you’ve described certainly appears to fall short of our standards and our well-established track record as world class support organization. I’m confident that this experience was an anomaly and would recommend that you contact support again and request to speak with a manager. I’m sure that they will be happy to review the ticket to ensure that we resolve your current problem(s) and that we conduct the appropriate review with the engineer you worked with.
While the merge with Object Tracking Tool is still in development, I am proud to introduce the new and improved version of Metadata Browser, which you can download here: MBsetupV2.0.exe
Improved Documentation Tool
New properties are now retrieved for common object types:
- Metrics: dimensionality, condition, transformation, smart (yes/no)
- Attributes: form, lookup table, child & parent relations
- Filters: expression
- Prompts: item list
Change Journal Tools
This new function only works with MicroStrategy version 9.0 or higher and it either shows the Change Journal entries for a single object or for all the objects in a particular folder.
God Mode
If you have admin rights you can connect using “God Mode” and thus gain access to hidden system files. An interesting use (found during the test phase) is to navigate to System Objects\Columns and make dependency searches directly on Columns.
This is a read only application. Using it won’t cause any changes to your Metadata.
First off, I’ve done it, I’ve fooled them all, they think I’m an expert! Muahahahahah.
There was a conference call last Thursday (10-08-09) led my COO Sanju Bansal to address the Free MicroStrategy Reporting Suite. I’ll keep it concise. It’s awesome, I’ve always thought it’s awesome. This call was meant to assist in the roll-out (getting bloggers to chatter about it, I’m assuming, is part of their Marketing strategy). So here’s my chatter. If you don’t take advantage of this, you’re retarded (take that PC police). I consult by the way…send me an email.
The conference starts with a background about the company. Largest Independent Public BI program….great fiscal health…etc. If you’ve attended MicroStrategy World, this is the first 15 minutes of any meeting you’ve attended. They present MicroStrategy as “Big Picture” platform software. Why “Free”? They want to get on the “right side of history earlier than everyone else.” The product is truly free, and there aren’t any “catches”. In order to attach to a piece of the BI software pie, then your free product needs to be fully capable, otherwise, what’s the point?
In other news…Subway just bought MicroStrategy?
There is a Gartner report they wanted to push. Check out the web page www.microstrategy.com/GartnerVol3
I only had one question (the least interesting since I’m not a industry analyst, but a video game geek), and so I’m not articulate or capable of putting together a coherent thought. I asked Sanju Bansal how customers that bought licenses before the free package would be able to match some of the free offerings. In my case…the free version has 2 “full” desktop licenses, my company has one. His answer was to download and utilize the entire free package…well, not exactly what we can do. We have well over a hundred licenses. What I want is that one extra licenses to I’ve at least met that minimum threshold of free licenses. I just want a free license! I’ll have to follow up with my sales person on that.
Anywho, here’s the link to the free reporting suite. Use it. Love it. I’ll leave the rest of the coverage to the pros.
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