Forum Discussion
Advice on a total on-premises solution
Stuck1 To your first point. If you have only being using the Desktop, you are correct, none of that is being pushed anywhere, all your information is on your local machine/network.
The two main parts of Power BI are the Desktop, which allows you to model and build reports, and the Service, which allows you to build reports and share. The "Sharing" is the key piece in the Service, which allows people to see dashboards on any device, etc, etc. But that piece is a Saas that sits on Azure, and that is where I reference compliance etc, when data is pushed into Azure.
To your last point, there is a lot of effort going into making Power BI and Excel work well together. The current "Analyze in Excel" feature in the Service, export to Excel, etc are markers of that effort. (Doesn't apply to you though, as you are only using the Desktop).
Power BI is just one part of a complete BI solution, I'd keep your eye on the updates to SQL 2016, as that sounds like the route you want to head.
Thanks so much for the information and links. Just a few further points:
I don't work in the US and I'm not aware of any compliance certifications, but I know our IT has reservations around certain aspects of 365, so it may just be a local decision that governs what we install or maybe there is something I'm unaware of! Just so I'm clear on this and I'm sorry if this is a dumb question: At the moment I'm using Power BI (Desktop) and loading various datasets from our server or my local machine - Surely non of that data is passed to Azure (at any point) is it?
I'm yet to look at the online version of Power BI, but I've seen it has a few functions that aren't in the Desktop version. At the moment Desktop seems to meet our needs (although the Azure ML would be nice). I'll maybe also take a look at the Pro version in due course.
I interpreted the roadmap the same way, but I could see no evidence of its implementation, now I know why. I guess its just a case of waiting, but the 'Publish to Pyramid Server' option confused me and made me question the apparent SSRS commitment.
In truth I'm reluctant to go down the SharePoint route having heard a few horror stories. To house eveything in SSRS would be great, but Power BI can't do everything we need so 'Excel > SharePoint' may still have a role.
Thanks again.
Stuck1 To your first point. If you have only being using the Desktop, you are correct, none of that is being pushed anywhere, all your information is on your local machine/network.
The two main parts of Power BI are the Desktop, which allows you to model and build reports, and the Service, which allows you to build reports and share. The "Sharing" is the key piece in the Service, which allows people to see dashboards on any device, etc, etc. But that piece is a Saas that sits on Azure, and that is where I reference compliance etc, when data is pushed into Azure.
To your last point, there is a lot of effort going into making Power BI and Excel work well together. The current "Analyze in Excel" feature in the Service, export to Excel, etc are markers of that effort. (Doesn't apply to you though, as you are only using the Desktop).
Power BI is just one part of a complete BI solution, I'd keep your eye on the updates to SQL 2016, as that sounds like the route you want to head.