Skip to content

Tag: Power BI Report Server

Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2019

Published August 2, 2018

The recent availability of the SharePoint 2019 public preview, and the supporting information that accompanies it has clarified the status of Business Intelligence features in SharePoint 2019. This release, with one exception, is the culmination of the process of decoupling BI from SharePoint which began in SharePoint 2016 through the removal of Excel Services. This decoupling strategy was initially articulated in the fall of 2015 with the document Microsoft Business Intelligence – our reporting roadmap which stated that SQL Server Reporting Services was to be the cornerstone of their on-premises BI investment (and not SharePoint).

The embedded BI features now run with SharePoint as opposed to on SharePoint. These changes do however require some planning and some effort on behalf of those that have already invested in the current platform and wish to move forward on-premises. With this in mind, and the fact that concise information around these changes is a bit difficult to find, I wanted to put this reference together. This post does not get into migration strategies, only the changes themselves.

The source for much of the below comes from discussions with the relevant product teams, and official information is found (today) in two primary places. The document What’s deprecated or removed from SharePoint Server 2019 Public Preview
which was published concurrently with the SharePoint 2019 public preview, and Christopher Finlan‘s presentation at the Microsoft Business Application Summit 2019 entitled Self-service BI and enterprise reporting on-premises with Power BI Report Server.

A summary of the changes to BI features, and a brief discussion of each is below.

Feature Status
SQL Server Reporting Services Integrated Mode Removed
Power View Removed
BISM file connections Removed
PerformancePoint Deprecated
PerformancePoint – Decomposition Trees Removed
Power Pivot for SharePoint Removed
Scheduled workbook data refresh Removed
Workbook as a data source Removed
PowerPivot management dashboard Removed
PowerPivot Gallery Removed

SQL Server Reporting Services Integrated Mode

SSRS Integrated mode was deprecated in November 2016, as was not a part of SQL Server 2017. However, organizations could continue to use SSRS versions from 2016 and prior in SharePoint 2016. This is not supported in SharePoint 2019, which means that integrated mode isn’t an option at all with SharePoint 2019. The good news is that the recent Report Viewer web part fully replicates the capabilities of the SSRS Integrated mode web part.

Power View

Power View was a feature of SSRS Integrated mode and is available in Excel. When Excel Services was removed in 2016, Power View in Excel required SSRS Integrated mode to work. Both supporting platforms are now gone, and thus Power View is not supported in SharePoint 2019.

BISM file connections

The BISM file connection type was used by Excel and SSRS to connect Power View reports to SQL Server Analysis Services data sources. This connection type has been removed along with Power View.

PerformancePoint Services

PerformancePoint is a combination of capabilities that includes dashboarding, scorecards, and analytic reports. Very few new features have been added to PerformancePoint in the last few versions, and this one even loses a few. Many of of these features are also available in Power BI and Power BI report server, and Microsoft has taken the decision to deprecate this product. This gives customers with a PerformancePoint investment time to migrate their assets but is a clear indication that it will also be removed in a subsequent release.

PerformancePoint – Decomposition Trees

The Decomposition Tree feature in PerformancePoint came originally from ProClarity – one of the three products that made up the original PerformancePoint product. These visuals are based on Silverlight, and have been removed from the product accordingly.

PowerPivot for SharePoint

PowerPivot for SharePoint is not supported in SharePoint 2019. PP4SP was originally a combination of two technologies – a specialized version of SQL Server Analysis Services, and a SharePoint service application. In the 2016 version, these two parts were split into two – the SSAS component became a part of the SQL Server installation media as SSQL – PowerPivot mode, and the service application, which continued the name PowerPivot for SharePoint. To be clear, it is the second of the two that has been removed. SSAS PowerPivot mode continues to be an important component and is used by Office Online Server for working with Excel files that have embedded models.

Scheduled workbook data refresh

This feature allowed for the automatic refresh of the data stored within Excel workbooks in SharePoint. It requires a PowerPivot data model to work, but the refresh operation would refresh all connected data in the workbook on a scheduled basis. This was a component of PowerPivot for SharePoint. It has recently been announced that this capability will soon be available in Power BI Report Server.

Workbook as a data source

With PowerPivot for SharePoint deployed, it is possible to use the data model in a published Excel workbook as the data source for another workbook. This feature will no longer be available, and there are no plans at present to reintroduce it.

PowerPivot Management Dashboard

Originally a part of SharePoint Central Administration, the management dashboard provided status updates on all PowerPivot for SharePoint operations. Being a part of PowerPivot for SharePoint, this has been removed accordingly.

PowerPivot Gallery

The PowerPivot Gallery is a modified SharePoint Document library form that displays worksheet thumbnails contained in published Excel workbooks. This component is Silverlight based, and part of PowerPivot for SharePoint. It has been removed accordingly.

Power View, Decomposition trees, and the PowerPivot gallery were the last remaining features that carried a Silverlight dependency. SharePoint 2019 no longer has any Silverlight dependencies.

These changes are significant for anyone with an existing Business Intelligence investment that plans to move to SharePoint 2019. I intent to write more about migration strategies and will be addressing these topics at various conferences in the future.

5 Comments

Power BI Report Server Completes the Vision for On-Premises Reporting

Published August 26, 2017

Microsoft today made available the August 2017 preview of Power BI ReportServer 2017. This preview includes the long awaited support of embedded data models, as well as the ability to render Excel reports natively. This is a major step forward, because with this release, Microsoft has completed its vision for its on-premises reporting platform that it first articulated in October of 2015.

Excel content being rendered in Power BI Reporting Server

The big news at the time was that the platform was stated to be SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Not SharePoint, not PerformancePoint, but SSRS. SSRS was a mature product that quite competently provided a platform for operational reports. What it needed was some modernization and the addition of some analytical and self-service reporting capabilities. Several of these capabilities were subsequently included with the release of SSRS 2016.

Gone would be the days of configuring complex SharePoint farms just to be able to work with analytical reports (ie Power View, Excel). New Features were being added to SSRS to make it a complete platform for both analytical and operational reports.

The Vision

The roadmap articulated four different report types, 3 of them analytical (by my definition) and one of them operational. These three types line up with reporting tools in the Microsoft BI stack:

Name Type Primary authoring tool ext
Paginated Operational SSRS Report Builder
SQL Server Data Tools		 .RDL
Interactive Analytical Power BI Desktop .PBIX
Mobile Analytical Mobile Report Designer .RDLX
Analytical Analytical Excel .XLSX

Therefore, reading between the lines, in order to be a complete reporting platform, SSRS needed to be able to render all of these report types. Paginated reports were of course always native to SSRS, and the roadmap announced that Mobile reports would be included in SSRS 2016 through the integration of Datazen. The roadmap further committed to SSRS being able to render Power BI files in the future.

SSRS 2016

SSRS shipped with some significant modernization improvements, including a much awaited HTML5 rendering engine, and it included Mobile Reports. Mobile reports are delivered through the Power BI mobile application, and SSRS visuals can be pinned to Power BI dashboards.

Significant plumbing was done to move the platform forward in 2016, but it still only rendered 2 of the 4 report types.

In November 2016, it was further announced that the 2016 version of SSRS running in SharePoint Integrated mode would be the last. Moving forward, Reporting Services will only run in Native Mode. In the same announcement. In the same announcement, as I noted in another post, for the first time, the SSRS team committed to providing Excel report rendering capability as well.

Power BI Reporting Server

We first saw the on premises rendering of Power BI reports in the first community preview of SSRS V.Next in the fall of 2016. Those previews required that the reports be directly connected to SSAS tabular models, but they were ground-breaking just the same. A user could be totally disconnected from the web, and still render Power BI reports.

In May of 2017, Power BI Report Server (PBIRS) was announced. A less confusing name could have potentially been SSRS Premium, because that is in essence what it is. PBIRS is everything that SSRS is, plus the ability to render Power BI reports. SSRS will continue forward as a product without Power BI rendering capabilities. It is just a licensing distinction.

The release today of the August 2017 preview of PBIRS allows for embedded data models, and therefore a much wider breadth of capabilities. These models cannot be automatically refreshed yet, but they will upon release. This is, after all, just a preview. If you need automatic refresh of these data models in the meantime, there is an excellent third party solution to do this: PowerPivot Pro’s Power Update.

The inclusion of Excel report rendering capabilities means that PBIRS is a complete report rendering platform, more complete even that the Power BI cloud service.

Moving Forward

Now that the basic on-premises capability has been provided, SSRS/PBIRS needs to pay attention to paying back the debt that it incurred when SharePoint Integrated mode was deprecated. Chief among these features is the SSRS web part. The lack of a decent web part is a blocker for many organizations to move forward with this strategy. Some migration tools to move from Integrated to Native mode (like this one that migrates in the other direction) would be highly useful as well.

Now with on-premises covering all the bases, it’s easy to spot a glaring hole in the cloud Power BI offering. While it supports all three types of analytical reports, there is currently no way to render operational reports in the cloud. Until this capability is provided, it appears that on-premises will have the most complete solution.

2 Comments