Best Practices for Using Distribution Services

MicroStrategy recommends the following best practices when scheduling Distribution Services subscriptions, in addition to the best practices given above:

• For best results, follow the steps listed in High-Level Checklist to Set Up a Report Delivery System.
• PDF, plain text, and CSV file formats generally offer the fastest delivery performance. Performance can vary, depending on items including your hardware, operating system, network connectivity, and so on.
• The performance of the print delivery method depends on the speed of the printer.
• When sending very large reports or documents:
  • Enable the zipping feature for the subscription so that files are smaller.
  • Use bulk export instead of the CSV file format. Details on bulk exporting are in the Reports section of the Advanced Reporting Help.
  • Schedule subscription deliveries to occur when your Intelligence Server is experiencing low traffic.
• If your organization is processing a smaller number of subscriptions, such as 100 or fewer, better performance may be achieved by sending each subscription to the largest number of recipients possible. This can be achieved by designing reports or documents that answer business questions for the widest variety of analysts and by adding prompts to the report or document. For an introduction to creating and adding prompts to a report, see the Basic Reporting Help.

  For information about how prompts are answered in subscribed reports, see Creating Subscriptions.

  If your organization is processing many subscriptions, such as 1,000 or more, better performance may be achieved by sending the largest number of subscriptions possible to the fewest recipients. For example, it may be possible to send all of a team's subscriptions to a project manager, who can then present and distribute the subscribed-to reports in team meetings.

  If you are processing many subscriptions, consider using the bulk export feature. Details on bulk exporting are in the Reports section of the Advanced Reporting Help.

• When creating contacts, make sure that each contact has at least one address for each delivery type. Otherwise the contact does not appear in the list of contacts for subscriptions that are for a delivery type that the contact has no address for. For example, if a contact does not have an email address, when an email subscription is being created, that contact does not appear in the list of contacts.
• When selecting reports to be subscribed to, make sure none of the reports have prompts that require an answer and have no default answer. If a report has a prompt that requires an answer but has no default answer, the subscription cannot run the report successfully, and the subscription is automatically removed from the system.
• Use macros to dynamically specify the delivery location and backup delivery location for a file device (see Creating and Managing Devices).
• The maximum file size of dashboard (.mstr) files that can be sent through Distribution Services is defined by the MicroStrategy (.mstr) file size (MB) setting. To access the setting, in MicroStrategy Developer right-click on the project and select Project Configuration… Then, In the Project Configuration dialog box, choose Project Definition > Governing Rules > Default > Result sets. The maximum .mstr file size is 2047 MB.