Getting up and Running with Crescent on CTP 3

The sharepoint requirement for Crescent is a bit of a show stopper if Sharepoint isn’t your day job. The following is an excellent step by step guide to getting up and running with a crescent demo. The following will be enough to get the Picnic Demo up and running. If you want to go on to develop you’re own models in Bids, continue with the steps further down.

Deployment Checklist for reporting Services, PowerPivot and Crescent: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh231687(SQL.110).aspx

All of the remaining links are in this one document.

‘Quick’ steps to get a demo up and running I took were:
- Built Windows 2008 R2 (I skipped SP1 due to download times).
- Let windows update run – promoted to DC.
- Created a single domain user who was also the domain admin, and ran the whole install as that user. This user was also used for the Analysis Services account. (remember this is for demoing only and means I don’t have to worry about setting explicit permissions on doc libraries or configuring Farm administrators)
- install sharepoint enterprise edition (do not configure – the denali setup will do this for us)
- install sharepoint SP1,
- run the denali setup for powerpivot (including stand alone instance) and used that to configure the farm, finally,
- installed the reporting services add-in from Denali setup.

I opted not to instal the Sql 2008 R2 oledb provider for backward compatibility, nor did I configure the user alerts, but I can go back and do that any time. so the key links you need are (again):
Deployment CheckList: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh231687(SQL.110).aspx

and
PowerPivot for Sharepoint: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210708(v=SQL.110).aspx
and Install Reporting Services in Sharepoint mode: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg492276(v=SQL.110).aspx

finally, I created a document library and allowed the BI content types so I could create BISM entries and launch crescent. You’ll need the sample spreadsheet (picnic sample) at: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=219108

This will only get you to a point where you can deploy and view a sample Crescent report. Currently the image is missing Office and the Powerpivot add-in for excel. If you want to go onto build your own models with Bids do the following:

- if you didn’t select Bids in any of the previous steps, re-run the sql install and add Bids
- because the powerpivot instance for SSAS is running in deploymentMode 1 (see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg471594(v=SQL.110).aspx) you’ll need to install a seperate workspace instance configured for tabular mode (mode = 2).

- once installed, before creating any new projects, open BIDS, select tools-options-analysis services. Set the workspace instance to that you’ve just installed. Since we’ve not installed Excel, the only thing not enabed will be the ‘analyze in excel button’.

Cheers – Ryan

 

Original Post by Ryan Simpson on August 1, 2011

Here: https://rionisimpsoni.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/getting-up-and-running-with-crescent-on-ctp-3/