Cancelling Another User's Checkout

Well its been about 8 Month's since I have made a post to my PerformancePoint blog. The last time I made a post to the blog I was working on a PerformancePoint Planning project using the CTP4 release. The project sucessfully deployed at the end of October 2007 and the customer was pleased with the results. After that I worked on another PerformancePoint project but this time it focused 100% on the Monitoring components of the product based on an Analysis Service Cube we built for them.

Over the last 4 months I have been engaged in a new PerforancePoint project using the RTM release of the product. We have not applied any of the updates for the RTM but I am looking forward for the Service Pack at the end of May or June. The current planning project is the largest our consulting team has developed to date. It has over 10 models, 200 plus business rules and 40-50 forms and reports. There is also requirements for formal Corporate reporting using Reporting Services against the PerformancePoint planning Schema. So hopefully I will have time to post any interesting ideas and issues we have during the project. In most cases I will try to use the Alpine Ski House application to demonstrate my point.

Now on to the actual post.....

For our current planning project there are up to three consultants making changes to the system whether it is creating forms/reports , making changes to dimension hierarchies or adding business rules. When a user checks out an object in the Business Modeler (Dimension, Model etc.) they are the only one who can make changes to it. Other users can still browse the object but they cannot perform any actions. If you find yourself locked out of a Dimension or Model I recommend developing a system where you send a group e-mail to your team members that you need access to a certain object in the Application. The other team member can then complete their changes and Check in the object.

Now of course there will always be the case where the person who checked out the object is out to lunch or decided to take the day off work (and have left their cell phone at home ). In this case if you are a Global Administrator (otherwise you will have to contact the Global Administrator) you might decide to simply log on to the Planning Administration Console and select Cancel Check . This is probably not a good idea. When you perform a Cancel Checkout it is at the model site level. It is not possible to select an object within the site. Secondly if you perform a Cancel Check out any changes made by the user before their last Save will be lost. This could potentially affect unsaved changes made to all dimensions and models in the model site!

Therefore it is important to only use this feature as a last resort or when you have verified that there are no unsaved changes in the Model Site. Even if the Cancel Checkout option saved the current changes, the Global Administrator should have the ability to cancel the checkout of a specific object instead of just the model site. This has been identified by Microsoft as a Known Issue:

http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102421821033

Troy

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