Microstrategy Blog

So a late night. I spent a lot of time at work today with our MicroStrategy project documenting all of the various elements, and I have some things that I do that might be unique, and others that might not, but it got me thinking about the “proper” way to document a project.

One of the things that I don’t like about the MicroStrategy tutorial project is the sporadic documentation. Some metrics are documented, some reports…and no filters, but that aside, here’s what I have recently started doing with my project at the “job” job (my real job).

First, find your metric or filter or whatever and right click, and select properties.

So, you’ll see that there’s the description section where you can say something along the lines of “This is a metric that measures the Gross Margin blah blah”. But there’s also a seldom used “Long Description”. So the question is…why would you use this “Long Description”? I use it for self auditing! As any consumer of BI software is aware, one of the most common questions you’ll hear is – are you sure this is right?  Unless you’re maintaining the source database, data warehouse, and etl…the answer is – “well…no”. But, you can at least make notes for yourself because no one remembers everything.

The point is…documentation is more than just helping the user understand what it is they’re dragging and dropping into their grids, it’s also there to help you understand what it is you’ve beein doing with the project, and keep track of when you’ve validated the data. Now when your users come up to you and ask whether or not it’s correct, you have at least a time that is was validated, and who did the validation. Consider it a CYA if you’re that type (international readers…google it). The Change Journal can help that a bit, but it’s a little bit of a space and processing drain, and realistically, every time you make a change…do you really want to document? Simmer down engineers. I suppose you can turn MicroStrategy into a subversion repository, but life should have a little mystery right? With the Change Journal, you’re also only documenting changes to whatever you’re editing…not necessarily things about that element.

This is for a home development box if you want to avoid some extra passwords, and clicks, as well as how to connect to a local host in the Web Administrator. Simple how to’s, but like I said, figuring out this video blogging thing. I’ll get into some more complicated things in the days and weeks to come.

For those of you with email delivery, click through the article title to view the video post, I’ve noticed that the you tube links embeds don’t come through in the email.

Here’s a simple “How To” For MicroStrategy Transformations. I’m digging the video blogging. I hate screen caps and typing and uploads.

Now that I have a sweet setup…you’ll be seeing a lot more of the lazy man’s way to blog. I’m always open to suggestions via the comments or the microstrategyblog – at – gmail dot com. Now if I could only edit out the bronchial inhaler I just noticed between the monitors, the ladies would totally dig me…hey…I’ve had allergies.

Next step is to make this a legitimate video podcast series and start adding numbers and episodes and putting it on iTunes…ugh…the work involved is already starting to exhaust me.

Here’s my first foray into video blogging.

A quick tutorial on how to embed a Twitter Widget in a MicroStrategy Dashboard.

Always fun to have more people in the market, especially since I’m such a slacker (expect more posts, my new gig is working pretty much exclusively with MicroStrategy).

Byran’s MicroStrategy Blog