Proclarity

Proclarity analytics now a key component of Microsoft BI stack, combining the strengths of Proclarity data analytics with Microsoft Reporting Services, Business Scorecard Manager and SharePoint Portal Server the product stack provides a robust BI solution.

Architecture










Proclarity for Reporting Services Proclarity for Reporting Services makes creating OLAP reports easier than ever with a wizard-driven user interface. Proclarity authors can create and publish reports using the Reporting Services XML Report Definition Language (RDL) and export WYSIWHYG views of data directly to an RDL file and that can be deployed on the report server. Report authors can conduct additional formatting or programming on datasets created with Proclarity.

As well the reporting services reports can also be easily integrated into a proclarity dashboard. The Proclarity dashboard has the capability to pass the parameters between the analytic views and reporting services.

Key Benefits:

• Reduced time and effort - Proclarity wizard-driven UI makes it easy to create reports or new OLAP data sets in Reporting Services without having to type complex MDX queries by hand
• Lower Cost of Ownership - The seamless integration of Proclarity and Microsoft Reporting Services leverages current technology investment at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions
• Reduce the time to make an informed decision - Quickly linking between Reporting Services reports and Proclarity Analytics allows users to easily transition between monitoring and analyzing

Proclarity for Business Scorecard Manager Proclarity analytics are made available in the Business Scorecard Manager(BSM) through a feature called "report view." This allows decision makers to discover the exceptions and analyze the root cause while doing the performance monitoring.

With Proclarity report view within a scorecard, one can easily move from monitoring performance to full ad-hoc analysis. This powerful connection leads to better decision making and a more successful overall scorecard solution.

Key Benefits:

• Zero-footprint, thin-client, Web-based analytics
• Seamless analysis of what's driving the KPIs
• Web-optimized charting and advanced visualizations
• A seamless link to additional ad-hoc investigation

With Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 V1 release the scorecard/dashboard features will be available as part of the PPS.

Proclarity for SharePoint Portal Server Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Proclarity for SharePoint Portal Server offer a robust portal solution with embedded analytics that provide at-a-glance views of targeted KPIs and important business views. These elements work together to enable faster and more informed decision making. Together, Proclarity and Microsoft continue to gain strength in the business intelligence (BI) industry.

Proclarity for SharePoint Portal Server is a Web part that displays Proclarity analytic views within a SharePoint Portal system. It enables the deployment of a zero-footprint Web client with centrally managed business logic, making it easy for IT staff, business users and analysts to publish meaningful analytic views to a SharePoint Portal Server with zero code.

Key Benefits:

Reduce the time and effort to embed analytics into the portal environment.

• Seamless integration - easily create and add Proclarity analytic views into SharePoint Portal
• No custom development required

Easily deliver tailored analytics within portal

• Easily create Web parts to display Proclarity views in a SharePoint Portal Server
• Put as much analytic power into portal - from static views to full ad hoc interactivity
• Link the full Proclarity analytic client to any Proclarity view within the portal enabling a quick transition to powerful analytic capabilities

One version of the truth in portal environment

• Information and business logic are centralized to provide decision makers with access to consistent data and common definitions
• Publish views and metrics based on predefined business rules
• Easily consumed KPIs are quick to add and maintain
• Best analytic practices within company are now easily shared through the portal

BlackPearl – K2.Net

The latest model of K2.Net is the BlackPearl. The upcoming release of K2 “BlackPearl” includes a set of tools that enable a new generation of users to collaboratively assemble dynamic business applications from reusable items.

The K2.net “BlackPearl” platform provides for full life-cycle analysis and development of your business solutions.Its unique modeling experience supports multiple, interchangeable modeling canvases (Process Design, role-based, documentation-based, and custom) and modeling tools (Office-style Windows application, Ajax-based web application, Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Visio 2007).K2.net “BlackPearl” ensures that the core process definition is the same regardless of the canvas or tool used to model the process by abstracting the view information from the process definition.The result is a solution platform that allows each participant to have the process modeling experience, regardless of the role (business user, developer, administrator, etc), to use the modeling canvas and tool with which they are most comfortable.

K2 “BlackPearl” will also include the following

• K2 “BlackPearl” Event Bus
• Simulation Modules
• ADO.NET Data Provider for K2 "Black Pearl"
• New data level security modules
• Process Inheritance
• Visual Process Debugging
• Visual Data Mapping

Description:

The K2.net “BlackPearl” process modeling life cycle will likely involve multiple participants using multiple modeling canvases from multiple modeling tools while all remaining in sync and producing a common process definition output.The K2.net “BlackPearl” Studio environment allows the designer to model the process using the view paradigm that works for them.K2.net “BlackPearl” will provide an impressive array of designers for developers, business analysts and all designers in between.

K2 is still a workflow product (now built on top of Microsoft’s Workflow Foundation), but it also becomes a true BPM platform, something the old version was not. K2 is also strong as an Enterprise Application Integration platform (leveraging the new BizTalk/.NET Adapter Framework built on Windows Communication Framework). K2 is also an Application Server with strong support for rapid application development (leveraging SOA standards and principles, SQL Server, the .Net Framework, Visual Studio, and the Office Platform). So it is a complete application server and development platform with a strong workflow engine at its core, and a very flexible integration platform built-in.

K2 BlackPearl provides multiple design tools that allow all stakeholders to actively participate in the creation of dynamic business applications.Any one can participate in the design and creation of processes,reports,forms and policies and use what’s been built to rapidly assemble applications to help them drive their business.

Maverick.NET Framework

Maverick.NET is a .NET port of Maverick, a Model-View-Controller framework for web publishing. It is a minimalist framework which focuses solely on MVC logic, allowing you to generate presentation using a variety of templating and transformation technologies

Features :
• Pluggable view templating technologies.
• Pluggable transformation technologies.
• Support for iterative transformations.
• Configuration using an XML sitemap.
• Framework support for internationalization, customization of content based on browser, and WML.
• The ability to use standard ASPX pages as Maverick controllers. There is full support for Server Controls, Postback forms, and View State.
• A fairly exhaustive set of sample applications using a variety of templating languages and controller types.

Depending on what templating technology you choose, you may be interested in one or more of the following features:

• Automatic XML serialization of arbitrary objects so that XSLT transformations can be used without the effort and processing overhead of generating and parsing text XML.
• The ability to halt iterative transformations at any step and obtain the intermediate result. In the case of XSLT and DVSL, this would produce static XML. This allows designers to build template files offline with simple tools.
• "Wrapping" transformations using basic templating languages like ASPX. This allows varying content to be easily encapsualted within a common layout, look-and-feel, etc.
• NFop transformations which can produce PDF documents on-the-fly.
• NVelocity and DVSL (an XSLT-like language based on Velocity) templates are now supported through the Opt-NVelocity package.

Working :
There are two basic phases in the life of an executing Maverick application. The first is the "load" phase which (usually) occurs once and uses the config file to construct a tree of workflow objects. The second is the "execution" phase in which http requests are serviced. Maverick is designed to perform as much work as possible during the load phase so that the execution phase can be as fast as possible.

The workflow tree constructed during the load phase represents all of the possible execution paths for servicing an http request. It consists of objects which implement various interfaces, and many of the objects are created by pluggable factories. After the workflow tree is built, the overhead Maverick itself adds to a running web application should be little more than a couple IDictionary lookups and a handful of virtual method calls.

The top level object is an ICommand object, which corresponds to a single defined command in the config file. Other than special implementations like the reload command, there are two basic implementations of the ICommand interface: CommandSingleView and CommandMultipleViews. The CommandFactory will automatically build the correct instance depending on how many views are available; the only difference is that CommandSingleView can eschew the IDictionary lookup to deterimine which view to render.

There is always one IController associated with every command; a simple null controller is generated by the ControllerFactory when no controller is specified by the user. In addition, it should be noted that from the perspective of the command objects, controllers always look like singleton controllers; a special ThrowawayAdapter is used for "normal" controllers.

The command object chooses an IView to render. IViews are built by the flexible IViewFactory system. At runtime, execution passes from the ICommand to the IView identified by the IController.Go() return value; the IView is responsible for "dealing with" the request from here out. There are many types of views.
If an IShuntFactory was defined in the modules part of the config file, the IView instances held by a ICommand will actually be instances of the decorator ViewShunted, which holds an IDictionary of real views and adds the mode switching behavior.

Actual IView implementations are responsible for tasks like sending HTTP redirects, or rendering the model using an ASPX page. Output is rendered through an ITransformStep object obtained from the IViewContext passed into Go(). Depending on the configuration in maverick.config, the ITransformStep may be the entry point for a sequence of transformations or it may actually dump the results directly to the response output stream.

Thus, at execution time, an HTTP request is serviced like this:
• The Dispatcher receives the request and looks in an IDictionary for the ICommand associated with the particular URL. ICommand.go() is called.
• The ICommand calls Controller.Go(). The controller optionally sets the model object (using a method on IControllerContext) and returns a string indicating the name of the view to render.
• The ICommand looks in an IDictionary for the IView to render. IView.go() is called and passed a IViewContxt object.
• If shunting was enabled, the IView will actually be an instance of ViewShunted. This object uses the IShunt to find the actual view to render; the actual mechanism for this is specific to the shunt.
• The IView generates some content and sends it to the ITransformStep obtained from IViewContext.NextStep. If there were no transforms defined, this step will actually be a special implementation that sends output directly to the real response.
• ITransformStep objects are chained together such that one passes information to the next. Eventually the data gets passed to the special implementation which sends output to the real response.

Single Sign-On

A gud link to know about Single sign-on

http://www.opengroup.org/security/sso/sso_intro.htm

InRule - Rule Engine

InRule is built entirely on the .NET platform, leveraging a component architecture that delivers unparalleled rule processing performance and flexibility. From the feature rich rule authoring environment to the optimized execution of the business rule engine, InRule unifies the domains of managed business logic and traditional systems processes.














Description:

InRule's new visual rule flow and modeling provides a graphical view of rule application elements and how they are related. Visual rule flow gives InRule users greater ability to understand where a rule application starts and ends and gives them a method for visually following the way one or more rulesets execute. Users can view and define rules through the point and click interface. Pan and zoom functionality makes it easy to navigate within large or complex applications.

Features :

• InRule's catalog services provide the ability to store, version, check-in/check-out, and set permissions on rules.


• Administrators can now view all the objects stored across multiple catalog instances and can "promote" a rule application from one catalog to another.


• InRule can be used as a Web-based Rule Management with AJAX Functionality
  Business Language Authoring and decision table controls are implemented as a set of embeddable web controls, providing greater flexibility in determining where rules can be maintained and edited


• Testing rule logic has been made even easier with irVerity, InRule's integrated testing component. Rule execution is simpler to follow with an improved layout and Watch Lists.


• Users can now define rules that are applied depending on the context in which a field is used.


• InRule's support for handling collections has been enhanced with new functions for effectively iterating over a series of items in a collection


• InRule allows users to specify rule sets to activate or deactivate based on category or metadata.


• User can choose to activate only online rules and deactivate batch rules depending on their needs


• A new Halt Ruleset function gives rule authors the capability of halting the execution of a rule with or without invoking a runtime error

Xml Web Services in Sql Server 2005

Database products are making it easier and easier to hook up Internet protocols directly to your data. Microsoft SQL Server is a case in point. While Microsoft SQL Server 2000 did allow Web data access, the process required to use the SQLXML library and a full installation of Internet Information Services. With SQL Server 2005, Microsoft has solved this issue.Now, you can have direct access to your SQL Server data from any HTTP SOAP client without any extra middleware at all - not even IIS.

Description:

Microsoft continues to bet heavily on Web Services as a backbone for service-oriented architectures, so it makes sense that they've chosen to expose SQL Server 2005 data via a Web Service. Or, to be more precise, you can create as many Native XML Web Services as you like in SQL Server 2005.

To do so, you use the new CREATE ENDPOINT statement to create HTTP endpoints. Each HTTP endpoint ties the results of a SQL Server stored procedure directly to a Web Service, providing support through the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) protocols for retrieving the data supplied by the stored procedure. SQL Server interfaces directly with the Windows HTTP listener process (http.sys) so that SOAP requests are routed directly to SQL Server, with no intervening middleware necessary. Similarly, SOAP responses are sent directly back to the requesting client.

Steps:
1)Create a simple Stored Procedure

CREATE PROC dbo.SalesStoreProc AS
SELECT ProductID, ProductName FROM Sales.Product

2)Creating an HTTP Endpoint

The next step is to create the HTTP endpoint. Running this SQL statement is what makes the data from the stored procedure available to SOAP clients:

CREATE ENDPOINT GetStores STATE = STARTED
AS HTTP( PATH = '/Store', AUTHENTICATION = (INTEGRATED),
PORTS = (CLEAR),
SITE = 'localhost')
FOR SOAP
( WEBMETHOD 'StoreList'
(NAME='AdventureWorks.dbo.SalesStoreProc'),
BATCHES = DISABLED,
WSDL = DEFAULT,
DATABASE = 'AdventureWorks',
NAMESPACE = 'http://AdventureWorks/Store')
GO

Key things to be noted:

• The STATE clause specifies the initial state of the endpoint. It can be started, stopped (listening but returning errors to clients) or disabled (not even listening for requests)
• The AS HTTP clause specifies the transport protocol to use. You can also specify AS TCP here.
• The PATH clause specifies the URL on the server that clients will use to reach this Web service.
• The AUTHENTICATION clause specifies how clients will authenticate themselves to the SQL Server: BASIC, DIGEST, NTLM, KERBEROS, or INTEGRATED.
• The PORTS clause specifies whether the service will listen on the CLEAR or SSL ports, or both (other clauses, not shown here, let you specify non-standard port numbers)
• The SITE clause lets you specify a hostname for the computer that will respond to requests.
• The FOR SOAP clause states that this endpoint will respond to SOAP messages. Other endpoints handle messages for Service Broker or database mirroring.
• The WEBMETHOD clause defines a Web method, mapping a method name to the name of a stored procedure
• The BATCHES clause specifies that this endpoint won't process arbitrary SQL statements.
• The WSDL clause specifies that it will provide WSDL support.
• The DATABASE clause specifies the database that contains the data.
• The NAMESPACE clause specifies the XML namespace for the messages.

Testing the Webservice:

The URL for the WSDL file (http://localhost/Store?wsdl) is determined by the CREATE ENDPOINT statement. The Web server is the server where SQLServer 2005 is installed. The PATH clause dictates the Store portion of the URL. The remainder of the URL is where SQL Server listens, by convention, for WSDL requests associated with this particular Web Service.
Thus SQL Server will accept, and respond to, standard HTTP SOAP 1.2 requests. This gives you a supremely easy way to hook SQL Server 2005 data into any sort of service-oriented architecture that you can dream up.

Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003

Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 is the easy way for small business customers to get the power of the Windows Server operating system plus Microsoft server-based solutions for e-mail, fax, database, and security-enhanced, shared Internet access, and file/print/calendar/application sharing-all in one integrated, simplified solution at an affordable price.Windows Small Business Server 2003 helps your small business customers work smarter with fewer resources.




















Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 will have the following installed
 Microsoft Windows Server 2003
 Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services V2.0
 Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
 Outlook 2003
 Microsoft Shared Fax Service
 Microsoft ISA Server 2000
 Microsoft SQL Server 2000
 Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003
 ROUTING AND REMOTE ACCESS SERVICE(RRAS)
 Mobile User/Device Support
 Shared Network Resources
 Backup and Restore
 Task Based Management

System Requirements:

• 300-megahertz (MHz) Processor
• 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM
• 4 gigabytes* (GB) of available hard disk space

Features :

• Protect key business information with an infrastructure that includes built-in firewall protection and security-enhanced remote access to help prevent unauthorized users from getting into your network.
• Keep your PCs and servers current with the latest software updates to enhance the security of your network.
• Prevent data loss by automatically backing up company information and enabling employees to retrieve accidentally deleted files and restore earlier versions of files
• Store, find and share information in one centralized location
• Provide employees with an internal Web site so they can find and share files and collaborate on group projects
• Work from virtually anywhere with remote access to business information and resources – e-mail, calendars, network files, internal Web sites and business applications
• Share resources and equipment such as Internet access, printers and fax machines
• Stay connected to your customers from virtually anywhere and anytime with remote access to business information and resources
• Manage your customer relationships more effectively with a centralized place to store and exchange information
• Use Windows Mobile-based devices to access e-mail, contacts, and calendars from virtually anywhere and at anytime
• Reduce costs and maximize limited resources