I am new to Microsoft BI and I am wondering if you need SSRS installed in order to deploy a PowerView report to SharePoint. My datasources will be Excel files.
I know my company has a SharePoint (don't know yet which version). I don't think SSRS is installed, can I still deploy a PowerView report on the SharePoint? Or is SSRS needed for this requirement? Datasource will be just excel files.
No, you need SSRS in SharePoint mode in order to use Power View reports. You will also need to have the Reporting Services Add-In for SharePoint and PowerPivot for SharePoint installed and configured. Your SharePoint instance will need to be 2010+, depending on your version of SQL and Excel.
When deployed in a SharePoint BI Centre, Power View utilises components of the SSRS installation for the report, and uses the PowerPivot server (essentially an SSAS Tabular instance) to store and process the data model.
If you think about it, it makes sense, since a Power View .RDLX file is essentially a zip file containing an SSRS report and some other stuff. Dan English wrote a good article exploring it.
MSDN has a good deployment checklist that I've used myself in the past.
Related
I've been trying to figure out if it makes sense to use SSRS 2012 with PowerView vs using SSRS 2008.
I've following questions:
What's better in SSRS 2012 without PowerView(ie without using Sharepoint)?
What edition of SharePoint you need to make PowerView work for SSRS 2012?
Does it make sense to learn and use Sharepoint if you can barely utilize the pluses of SharePoint or PowerView instead of SSRS 2008 or SSRS 2012 without PowerView/SharePoint?
I can address the overall question but not the first two bullet points specifically as I have not used Sharepoint enough to give the version differences on it.
Powerview from everything I have ever done is a dll that allows a report like object to be created as an add on to Excel. These objects can then be hosted in Sharepoint in a library. The downside is you need to have the dll's and the add on to Sharepoint to use it. As far as I know you are committing to user's going to SharePoint with this option. They do make it kind of neat though as you generally make what I believe they call a 'PowerPivot' which is just like a client dataset made in the Excel file that you report off of. This option is good for a shop that works with Sharepoint Extensively. I have not heard of too many places using it for client facing front ends or external reporting.
SSRS's newest invocation is SSRS 2012 which from everything I have seen in development is the EXACT SAME THING as SSRS 2008R2 except they put a 2012 in the namespace. There may be minor tweaks on naming and intellisense and under the hood things but the langauge is almost identical. Saying that SSRS 2012 is free with advanced tools for SSRS now and can also port to most front ends you would want: HTML in a form talking to it's service, ASP.NET, a client app like WinForms or WPF. You basically created and host reports and you can access them anywhere.
The real question for most people is: "Which reports look cooler and are easier to use?" I would go with SSRS, but know it is more of learning curve of understanding SQL and a little bit of xml and Visual Studio(very light). However Powerview is more graphical with it's parameters and options to an end user and has highlighted some things it can do with mapping interactivity that SSRS cannot do. The biggest detractor for SSRS IMHO is two things:
It is not event based at all. This shows up whenever you are doing mapping or something you want to zoom or perform actions that then produce other actions or 'events'. It can do a 'click' do something but NOT on the same page necesarrily. Usually you trick it to open a new form for a 'drill through' or use javascript to trick it to do a cheap man's version of hover over reporting by opening a form when you click.
To continue off of one it is this way on default behaviors of values of parameters and passing them down. Everything with SSRS is made to happen once at execution and then anything else happens to leave the form, not stay there.
Saying all that I still like SSRS better. It tends to handle large datasets when PRESENTING them better. Not necessarily all the time at getting them as the PowerView optimizes the set locally but at the expense of huge excel files. Sort of like psuedo cubes. They are fast, but you have a big file size for that expense. But with a lot of data they tend to be clunky as they are Excel based. Yes the query at the end will return faster but you have a huge file. When in reality if you are skilled at SQL SERVER you could be creating a Report Warehouse that is well indexed off of metrics and a cube as well to do this stuff for MANY REPORTS. SSRS is more for developers of TSQL, versus PowerView is more for analysts that know a little SQL but love Excel. They want a 'Select * from (table)' and then form the data, not they know how to do advanced groupings on their set first and then want to present a finished product to someone.
To answer your questions one-by-one:
What's better in SSRS 2012 without PowerView(ie without using Sharepoint)?
In "native mode" SSRS, i.e. a non-Sharepoint installation, there's not an awful lot of new stuff. The renderer now supports Word/Excel 2007-2010 format (i.e. DOCX, XLSX) output and the addition of native mode Data Alerts seem to be the only real difference to 2008 R2.
What's new in SSRS 2012
What edition of SharePoint you need to make PowerView work for SSRS 2012?
Unfortunately, you need SharePoint Enterprise Edition.
Does it make sense to learn and use Sharepoint if you can barely utilize the pluses of SharePoint or PowerView instead of SSRS 2008 or SSRS 2012 without PowerView/SharePoint?
If you are only looking at SharePoint to host/share PowerView and SSRS, it's definitely not worth the investment, in my opinion. There are other alternatives now that are much more accessible to smaller organisations, or those who don't want to invest heavily in SharePoint infrastructure.
PowerView is built in to Excel 2013, which allows users to build their own PowerView reports. Until recently though, there was no way to share these other than passing the Excel files around. However, Microsoft have now released the preview of Power BI, which is an Office 365 based BI platform, essentially providing SMEs with a cheaper and easier alternative to setting up a SharePoint server, and allowing self-service BI. It enables users to upload their Excel files containing PowerViews and share them with their organisation. You can also share other creations, such as Power Query projects, and internal data sources. All without an on-site SharePoint installation.
If you really want to try out PowerView, I'd suggest getting yourself a trial of Excel 2013, or sign up to the Power BI preview and give it a shot. Personally, I wouldn't recommend upgrading to 2012 purely to upgrade your SSRS installation, the new native mode features aren't really worth the cost/effort. If you're looking at upgrading the rest of your infrastructure though, (SQL, SSAS, SSIS) then it's definitely worth doing.
also wanted to add that if your deploying from VS to sharepoint directly; you versions have to be close together i.e. 2008 ssrs on sharepoint 2009 etc. You may not be able to deploy a rdl built in 2008 on sharepoint 2012,13. We had similar issues at one of my previous projects.
I'm creating custom SSRS reports for a client that uses CRM Online. However, I'm not able to deploy reports that have SQL DataSource connections to them. I get the following error:
"Invalid Data Source. This report type is not supported. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online supports only reports that use Fetch XML data sources."
However, this error is somewhat untrue. Reason: When I download other custom reports from their CRM, the DataSources are all SQL connection strings with T-SQL queries.
So, there MUST be a way to deploy these reports. From within the client's network perhaps? I've not been able to find any details online thus far. Help?
I'm afraid there is no solution. CRM Online will only allow you to upload fetchXml based reports. There is no workaround (that I have heard of at least).
Are you sure that the other reports you downloaded are definitely custom (CRM allows some system reports to be SQL based) or if custom do they actually work (nevermind how they got there in the first place!).
Yes it's possible with couple of work around.
You need to create your data source for SQL and upload it on your CRM server. Do you have SSRS services running on your CRM server ? if yes then there would be 2 data sources available. One for CRM data source (fetch XML) and another for SQL server.if it's not there you need to create it .
Once you have those data source you are good to get your data in your SSRS report. Make sure your data source name should match with your SSRS report data source. (I have on-promise environment for my CRM 2011)
I have some records in SharePoint server. I have to create some reports using SSRS. I am little bit confuse that I used SharePoint list for creating reports or I used separate database for creating SSRS report. Please let me know which one is best way for creating SSRS report, using SharePoint list or using separate SQL Server database.
Thanks.
If you're dealing with relatively small datasets, it's probably fine to get data from SharePoint lists but this is not supported directly until SSRS 2008 R2. However, you can try to adapt the technique described here for earlier versions:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/24469/SQL-Reporting-Services-data-from-SharePoint-lists
This example explains how to do this with SharePoint 2007 - I'm not sure what you'd need to do to make it work with SharePoint 2010. You don't indicate in your question which version of SharePoint you're using, so I'll throw it out there just in case it's helpful.
If you're using SSRS 2008 R2, then you have a built-in SharePoint list source which you can learn about here: http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2068/using-a-sharepoint-list-as-a-data-source-in-sql-server-reporting-services-2008-r2/
I would consider it a reasonable source if the reports run fast enough. If they don't, you might need to set up a separate database so that you can tune the queries and/or the data to get better performance.
I have Sharepoint 2007 site and have to implement filter (comboboxes) for the list of employees stored in external database.
I can develop web part with asp:DropDownList(s), data access library and asp:Repeater stuff, but don't wanna mess with paging and sorting. May be it's better to populate standard sharepoint list that will be present under my filters via my DAL ?
How would you implement such a task?
Here are my suggestions:
SharePoint List Source and Destination - this is a CodePlex project for an SSIS SharePoint adapter. We used it successfully earlier this year for transferring data between SQL Server and SharePoint.
Custom Timer Job - you could create a SPJobDefinition class that is your own mini-homespun ETL comparing the SharePoint list to the database tables and then making any necessary transfers.
Business Data Catalog (BDC) - I'm not a fan, but you might have better luck with it.
SharePoint 2010 - I'm not sure if this is an option, but I'll mention it. The BDC of SharePoint 2007 has grown into Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but it is supposed to be much improved for accessing external data.
Are there any tools on the market that effectively analyze data in SharePoint lists? I have a client looking to analyze and report on employee performance data stored in SharePoint.
Does SSRS give you anything useful?
Do you just need to report the data, or do you require complicated aggregation?
Nintex reports on SharePoint itself (and is acually quite cheap). The way the question is stated the report might be about employee data in a sharepoint list so SSRS does make more sense.
You can also look at some the BI features that come with MOSS Enterprise such as the KPI web part, scorecards, reports, Excel services and dashboards.
In addition to SSRS you should also consider using either Excel or Access to run reports :-
Analysing SharePoint Data in Excel
(Look for the section titled SharePoint-to-Excel and Data Synchronization)
How to Link SharePoint Server 2007 Lists with Microsoft Access 2007
Page currently borked, cached version http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:YnuTwWha77UJ:sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx%3FID%3D68+connecting+access+to+sharepoint+lists&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk
Remember that you can also access the list data as XML so any 3rd party BI/reporting tool that can call one of SharePoints web services and manipulate the resulting XML could also be used - there are must be hundreds of contenders here.
The best tool to use depends upon many factors such as what you may be familiar with, the complexity of analysis you need, if you need static or dynamic reports (drill down etc). BI & Reporting tools are a huge area!
Finally if you need fairly simple PivotTable/crosstab type functionality then this CrossTab web part may be suitable (disclaimer - its sold by my company)