PerformancePoint 2010 Dashboard Designer – ‘An unexpected system error has occurred’ when adding a data connection

Whilst trying to setup a PerformancePoint 2010 dashboard on my SharePoint 2010 boot to vhd environment today I received this error message – ‘An unexpected system error has occured’…’ when adding a data connection in the Dashboard Designer.

A couple of Google searches didn’t turn up much but did point me towards the ‘Secure Store Service’ – this can be found in Central Administration > Manage Service Applications.

The service was started but when I tried to manage the service I received another error stating that the service was not responding!

It was then that I realised – the environment in question did not contain the pre-requisite WCF hotfix which is required for SharePoint 2010 to install on Windows Server 2008 R2. This machine had actually been been upgraded from Windows Server 2008 x64 to Server 2008 R2 x64 (this was the SharePoint Information Worker VHD) therefore the hotfix did not exist.

I was worried I would have to re-install SharePoint after installing the hotfix but it turns out you don’t need to, just follow the steps below –

1. Download the Windows Server 2008 R2 WCF hotfix (there are two versions of this patch and the latest is version 2 – ‘Windows6.1-KB976462-v2-x64.msu’), get it from here – KB976462
2. Install the hotfix and reboot the machine
3. Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration wizard – PSCONFIG
4. Proceed through the wizard and it will upgrade your SharePoint farm
5. Check in Central Administration and you should now be able to successfully manage the ‘Secure Store Service’ and Dashboard Designer should work!!

Hope this helps 🙂

The Gadget Show Live

I attended the Gadget Show Live at the NEC in Birmingham last week – the tickets were bought for me as a Christmas present from my partner. I thought I would do a quick write up of the show with a few pics.

We went on Thursday which was the first day of the show and it was packed to say the least. This was the queue waiting for the doors to open –

“Thousands of geeks” 

3D tech dominated the exhibition with Sony, Panasonic and Nvidia displaying their latest kit. Each of these manufacturers were offering demo’s of their 3D systems – we went to see the one by Nvidia.

The demo was impressive and I had a feeling that the cost of all this kit would be expensive and it was! Nvidia’s offering was a 3D capable GPU retailing at around £300 plus another £300/£400 for a 3D capable monitor and ‘Active’ (powered) 3D glasses.

Other stands we visited on the day included SCAN computers who were demonstrating the art of overclocking using liquid nitrogen.

One of the highlights of the day was riding the YikeBike around a short ‘Test Track’ which was setup for testing some of the personal transport gadgets on offer. Here is a pic of the track –

“The Test Track”

For those of you who haven’t heard of the YikeBike it is the world’s first folding electric bike and looks very similar to a penny farthing. It was pretty fun to ride although tricky to get the hang of – once you got the hang of it you could really get some speed up and have some fun.

“The YikeBike”

The other main highlight for me was the 1 hour long ‘Supertheatre’ show. The show featured each of the show’s presenters – Suzi, Jason, Ortis and John undertaking challenges and performing stunts for the audience. The show also featured Titan the robot – http://www.titantherobot.com/ who was very entertaining! They also gave away some tech during the show although it was only a few items. While we waited in the supertheatre they had Festo robotic ‘AirPenguins’ flying around to entertain us –

“Festo flying AirPenguins”

Overall I really enjoyed the Gadget Show Live and would recommend it although I did think they could have given away some more tech/prizes on the day.

Top day out indeed! 🙂