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Iaine's avatar
Iaine
Frequent Visitor
6 months ago
Solved

Sharepoint online and Reporting server

I’m currently evaluating Power BI Report Server as a natural progression from our existing SSRS environment. The server is up and running, and I’m now in the testing phase. So far, connectivity to SQL Servers and APIs works as expected, and I’m aware that SSAS requires being added to the PBIRS trusted servers list due to the newer security restrictions.

However, I’ve come across something surprising: SharePoint Online lists are not natively supported in Power BI Report Server. Although they work without issue in Power BI Desktop, PBIRS does not support OAuth authentication or scheduled refresh for SharePoint Online data sources, which means they cannot be used directly or refreshed once published. Instead, the recommended approaches involve exporting the SharePoint list data into SQL Server or using an intermediate connector or automation flow to sync the data to an on‑premises location before PBIRS can access it.

 

Is anyone aware of any future developement to include this or is there any point using PBIRS if you have the Power Bi Service?

 

Email subscription on Power BI Reporting Server
sharepoint online

3 Replies

  • lbendlin's avatar
    lbendlin
    Super User
    6 months ago

    Report Server is focused on internal authentication (NTLM/Kerb etc).  You would need to connect to SharePoint On-Premise.

  • Nasif_Azam's avatar
    Nasif_Azam
    Super User
    6 months ago

    Hey Iaine ,

    PBIRS lacks the ability to handle OAuth-based authentication, which is exactly what SharePoint Online requires for scheduled data refresh. As of now, Microsoft has given no public signal that this capability will be added to the on-premises report server.

     

    SSRS 2022 is the final standalone release: SQL Server 2025 merges all on-premises reporting into PBIRS. However, Microsoft's real investment is in the cloud-based Power BI Service, which gets monthly updates vs. roughly three per year for PBIRS. The gap keeps widening, and with Office Online Server retiring from PBIRS by end of 2026, the cloud-first direction is unmistakable.

     

    PBIRS still has legitimate use cases, but they are narrowing:

    • Strict data residency (healthcare, government, finance)
    • Air-gapped or limited connectivity environments
    • SSRS migration bridge
    • Licensing economics 

     

    For SharePoint Online data in PBIRS, the workarounds you try:

    1. Power Automate → sync SharePoint list to SQL Server → PBIRS refreshes from SQL
    2. Azure Data Factory / Dataflows → land data on-prem
    3. Manual refresh in Desktop and re-publish

     

     For Detailed Information:

     

    Best Regards,
    Nasif Azam

  • Murtaza_Ghafoor's avatar
    Murtaza_Ghafoor
    Super User
    6 months ago

    Yes, it does not support OAuth-based cloud data sources like: 1- SharePoint Online 2-Dataverse 3-Many modern APIs 4-Fabric Lakehouse.

    Because PBIRS does not support modern cloud authentication flows.

    Workaround for this would be: 


    Sync SharePoint list → SQL Server (via Power Automate or scheduled job)

    ETL SharePoint → staging DB

    API pull → on-prem storage

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