Forum Discussion
integration with sharepoint 2013
Hi Anonymous,
Is there something specific that you are interested in ?
Sharepoint is a mechanism that helps streamline how your company can centralise data and reporting, which can eventually be fed into Power BI. I can only give you a few ideas based on what we (my company) has done:
Note*
If you want full capability of Microsoft's BI suite, then you will need Sharepoint Enterprise 2013 installed on your local infrastructure OR Azure on a VM.
Sharepoint is used as our central reporting/BI portal that provides the following capability:
1. Repository for Data files (mainly CSV & Excel) used for reporting purposes. Each department is responsible for maintaining their pages.
2. Access to online PowerView, PowerMap etc reports for each department
3. Uploading of PowerBI source files to OneDrive, to allow automatic refreshing of PowerBI Dashboards (I know OneDrive is a separate product, however we integrate it with Sharepoint to avoid confusing staff).
4. SSRS reports
5. SSAS cubes (Note* We haven't created any cubes as yet. However, this functionality is just around the corner for PowerBI)
6. We allow select users to open raw data files within PowerBI. These are essentially just links back to the CSV/XLS file in Sharepoint that automatically open in Excel.
I don't think this answers your question, but if you are more specific, I am sure we can help you out further.
Cheers,
Dan
- Hi,
As im new to sharepoint and for now havent truly used pbi in my clients, i was trying to understand the possibilites of integration, if they exist.
I also dont know about ssrs, do you know any great article/tutorial about ssrs report on sharepoint (more important for me than truly knowing srrs)
Thanks for answering, happy new year!Hi Anonymous,
I am assuming you know Crystal Reports ? SSRS is essentially Microsoft's equivalent product. SSRS is not as good as Crystal Reports in a one-on-one comparison. However, once you take into account Microsoft's entire BI suite and tie it in with Sharepoint, you now have a BI product that is pretty much in a league of its own.
I would just google ssrs tutorials (I don't know of any particular sites.). However, there are a lot of companies offering SSRS courses that can go from 1 - 3 days.
As mentioned, I think Sharepoint should be seen as a portal to BI. It helps tie all of Microsoft's BI products into one accessible location and is actually good practise to encourage people to store data files in a common location for reporting. To the end user, they will assume it is all the one product. To you and me, we will know it consists of up to 10 different BI products that we need to manage separately. The end user does not need to know this.
Microsoft's BI suite is quite large and it makes sense to integrate it into a common location. From memory, these products are:
1. Power BI - Equivalent to Qlik & Tableau
2. PowerPivot
3. PowerView
4. PowerMap - Mapping analysis
4. PowerQuery - Analysis
5. SSAS - Cubes. The most powerful form of data analyis. Similar to COGNOS and Business Objects
6. SSRS - Report design and publishing similar to Crystal Reports
7. Excel
Sharepoint has a native viewer that allows files from these various products to be viewed/used within Sharepoint. The option still exists to open them up in the original program as well.
When I joined my company, they had COGNOS, Crystal Reports, Tableau, Sharepoint, an unknown BI product from the UK, and a 3rd party data warehosue provider. This was overkill. We now have a much simpler BI product (as described above) that does what all the previous products used to do combined. The new solution is not perfect, but it easily replicates 95% of the capability that we used to have, plus the addition of new capability.
Cheers,
Daniel
Hi,
This is really useful. We're currently testing SharePoint 365 with Power BI and I'm concerned that the solution is currently a little clunky for our end users (Managers who view the reports) who are'nt particularly techy. It's also reliant - or rather, works best with - apps when viewed on mobile devices. Ideally all end users would be able to view reports within a SharePoint site without the need to launch the PBI Service. I can see that there is an add-on to embed reports, but it looks like there are additional password prompts.
Any advice or best practice would be greatly received as this is a great tool, it's just communicating the insights to an audience that is the weak link. I know its being worked on though :)
