Once the site is created you’ll see a page that looks like this:

Ok.  Now we’re ready for business.  In order to create a PerformancePoint dashboard you’ll need to open Dashboard Designer and there are several ways to do this.

Method #1

If this is your very first time opening Dashboard Designer you’ll need to open it from the Business Intelligence Center.  On the right hand side of the page you see three orange headings: Monitor Key Performance, Build and Share Reports, and Create Dashboards.  Hover over the first heading, Monitor Key Performance, and click on the third link in the center of the page called “Start using PerformancePoint Services“.  The next page that opens will have a large button called “Run Dashboard Designer”.  Click it.  You may be prompted to run an application, don’t be alarmed, this is actually the install for Dashboard Designer.  It takes just a minute or so to complete and once finished Dashboard Designer will open.  Of course it goes without saying that the install for Dashboard Designer only happens the very first time you click the “Run Dashboard Designer” button.  After that, any time you click the button Dashboard Designer will open right up.

Method #2

Now that Dashboard Designer has been installed you can open it from the Start menu.  Click on All Programs, expand the SharePoint folder, and click on PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer.  Make sure you expand the “SharePoint” folder and not the “Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products” folder. 

Method #3

Once you have some PerformancePoint objects deployed to SharePoint you can open Dashboard Desiger from the PerformancePoint Content list.  By default you can access this list from the left-hand nav bar, but if it’s not there you can get to it by clicking “All Site Content”.  To open Dashboard Designer from the PerformancePoint Content list, click the down arrow for one of the items and select “Edit in Dashboard Designer”.

Method #4

The final, and in my opinion, best way to open Dashboard Designer is by using a URL.  Not a URL to the “Run Dashboard Designer” page from Method #1, but a URL that opens Dashboard Designer directly.  To do this you’re going to have to do a little sleuthing.  First thing to do is navigate to the “Run Dashboard Designer” page from Method #1.  Assuming you’re using Internet Explorer, make sure the Menu bar is displayed in your browser.  Click on View and select “Source”.  This will open up the HTML source code behind the webpage.  Since we know that clicking the button automagically opens Dashboard Designer, do a search in the HTML source code for the text on the button, “Run Dashboard Designer”.  Notice the OnClick method of the button is calling a Javascript function called “OpenDD”. 

Now search for the OpenDD function name, it will probably be defined towards the top of the document.

Once it has been found, copy the function code and past into a Management Studio query window and transform it into working SQL code.  You don’t have to do this, but I recommend it because the final expression is a bit tricky to do in your head.  At least, it’s tricky for me to do in my head…

Here’s the actual SQL code…

DECLARE @designerRedirect AS VARCHAR(MAX)
SET @designerRedirect = '_layouts/ppswebparts/designerredirect.aspx'

SELECT @URL

Make sure the values reflect your environment.  When you run the query you should end up with something like this:

http://SQL2012Dev/sites/BI/Finance/_layouts/ppswebparts/designerredirect.aspx?SiteCollection=http://SQL2012Dev/sites/BI/&SiteLocation=Finance/

To test that it works, copy the URL into your browser and verify that Dashboard Designer opens with your content.

================================================================== 

Website error details 

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; 
.NET CLR 1.1.4322; MS-RTC LM 8; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Timestamp: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 18:27:45 UTC

Message: Library not registered.

Line: 1935
Char: 4
Code: 0
URL: http://server/_layouts/1033/init.js?rev=ck%2BHdHQ8ABQHif7kr%2Bj7iQ%3D%3D

==================================================================

Apparently the Outlook upgrade did something to a DLL (removed it?) that SharePoint needs.
If you have just upgraded from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 and you receive a similar error, simply run Office Diagnostics and it should fix the problem!

To run Office Diagnostics follow these steps:
1. Open Microsoft Outlook 2007
2. On the Help menu, click Office Diagnostics
3. Click Continue, and then click Start Diagnostics

This morning I needed to check the properties for one of our SharePoint application pools so I logged onto the server and opened Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.  To my surprize the root was empty; it should have automatically connected to the localhost.  To my even greater surprize, all attempts to manually get IIS to connect to the server yeilded the message “The path specified cannot be used at this time”. 

After a quick search I found a post by Old Nick stating that this problem is easily resolved by restarting the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service.  That’s pretty obvious, right?  Sure enough, restarting that service solved the problem.  The next time I opened IIS it connected to the localhost.