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

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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.