I was really excited to hear that Microsoft was finally going to offer a decent OOTB Charting web part when I heard about the Chart Web part in SP 2010. Having used the Dundas Chart Web part for Sharepoint extensively in SP 2007, I told all my team members that this would eliminate the need to renew our Dundas Chart license once we migrated to 2010, since Microsoft acquired the same web part from Dundas.
Well, I spoke too soon.
After I started playing with the SP 2010 web part, I realized ,even though Microsoft made it a part of the OOTB offering, they elimininated several powerful features from it. The lack of those features made the the 2010 Chart web part less useful for our purposes.
The list of those features is as follows:
1) Code Editor:
Dundas chart has a great Code Editor that lets you do things like manipulate data formats, apply business logic, hide/show the chart web parts etc. See the screenshots below:
Counter Argument: Some of these tasks can be done in Performance Point, but that does involve migration effort. Also the Chart web part is probably sealed so we cannot extend it.
2) Connect to External Data sources
This was a real bummer. In SP 2007, we built several Dundas Dashboards using a custom sql server database and simply writing stored procs that returned data to the Dashboards.
By not including this option, we were suddenly faced with a huge development effort of recreating all our existing dashboards to use some other data source, such as a SP List or BDC.
Please see screenshot below:
Counter Argument: This could be accomplished in BCS, but that again involves migration effort.
3) Advanced Properties
In version 2.6 of the Dundas Chart, several new and useful Advanced Properties were introduced, such as the ability to do Aggregation Operations on data from an Excel Worksheet at run time. This option was not included in SP Chart web part.
Hopefully in a future release of Sharepoint, or a Service Pack, this functionality would be introduced.
Please see screenshot below:
Counter Argument: Once again, some of these could be done using Analysis Services, BCS or Performance point.
Conclusion:
Power users of Dundas Dashboards cannot expect to save maintenance effort and costs by migrating to the Sharepoint 2010 Chart web part. They will need to migrate to the Dundas Chart for sharepoint 2010.
5 comments:
This describes problems we are running into with lost functionality of Dundas in SP 2010. Have you found a work around to the missing code editor?
Hi Bear,
No workarounds found as yet. The only workaround is to license the Dundas web parts separately, install them separately and use them in your farm instead of the OOTB Chart web part.
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