PPS Exam

The PerformancePoint Server exam was an interesting experience today.
I studied for the planning portion for 3 hours last night and an hour
this morning to gain some experience in an area that I hadn't previous
looked too deeply into. Most of my previous experience with PPS has
been with the Monitoring and Analysis portion. Today's test was mostly
planning questions with around 6 of the 66 questions being about
Monitoring and Analysis and about 3 questions on installing PPS. So
now it is back to the training to prepare to retake the exam when it
is ready in December.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 - Applications (Beta) Certification Exam

Tomorrow morning I go to take the Microsoft Technology Specialist 71-556 Microsoft(R) Office PerformancePoint™ Server 2007, Applications certification exam. This exam is in beta right now and should be available in December. I have been using PerformancePoint off and on for about a month now and there are a lot of things you can do with it. Following are the areas that will be included in the exam (from an email from the Microsoft BI team):

Configuring Dimensions

Configure properties of predefined dimensions

Configure the time dimension

Configure a member property

Populate dimensions and member sets

Update dimension members and member set, and member properties

Configuring Models

Create a PPS model

Configure the current period

Configure model and dimension usage within sites

Transfer data between models

Configuring Business Roles and Process Management

Configure business roles

Configure security for users

Configure assignments

Configure an approval structure

Developing Business Rules

Develop an assignment rule

Develop a definition rule

Develop an allocation rule

Configure template rules

Configure rule execution

Building Excel Add-In Forms and Reports

Build an Excel Add-In report

Configure an Excel Add-In report as a form

Configure report filters

Format an Excel Add-In report

Developing Dashboards

Create a report by using the Dashboard Designer

Add a data source connection

Add a new Web page report

Configure a KPI by using Dashboard Designer

Create a scorecard

Build a dashboard

Installing PerformancePoint Server

Install the monitoring and planning services

Configure a PerformancePoint application

Configure the PerformancePoint server

Assign users to administrator roles

I will be including posts on PerformancePoint as I lean more about it.

Controlling the BLOB

The third part of the caching trilogy covers the BLOB cache, or binary large object cache. In a typical site there are many references to CSS files and images. MOSS caches these objects to prevent multiple trips to the database for these resources. MOSS caches these resources on the Web-front end servers in the file system. This type of caching is not enabled by default.

To enable BLOB caching change the line in the Web.config file for the blobcache to true. You can set the maximum size for the cache in this line as well. The default is 10 GB. In the path attribute you can determine the file extensions that will be cached in this type of caching. You may want to add such file extensions as .swf for Flash movies, if your site utilizes them. NOTE: this caching only works on items that are in document libraries and lists. If you place files in the site but not in a library or list, the caching will not cache the file.

<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" max-age="86400" enabled="True"/>

You can also set the maxAge to the number of seconds that you want the client to retain the object in its cache. This allows the client to use its copy of the resource and not re-request the URL for the resource until the timeout has expired.

With these three types of caching your Internet facing MOSS site can efficiently serve up files to many users.

Additional resources for caching:
Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog
Custom Caching Overview