I'm in a position of evaluating products / approaches to build Business Intelligence Dashboards on top of Sharepoint WSS (no MOSS at this stage). Does anyone have any suggestions where would be a good place to start?
The BI platform is currently built on SQL Server 2005 / SSIS / SSRS and we're currently investigating adding SSAS to the mix so we're very Microsoft centric at the moment.
Thanks,
Steve
Perhaps this article on how to build dashboards with SSRS/Sharepoint: Building a Dashboard in SQL Server Reporting Services.
In my experience building a dashoard with SSRS/SharePoint is mostly a function of the quality of the talent involved, not the tools. SSRS and Sharepoint are both quircky, but they can get the job done out-of-the-box.
We succesfully built a WSS based BI tool for our product. The biggest challenge for us was to get delegation of security to pass through from the browser to WSS to SSAS to utilise SSAS role security to make sure the one client could'nt possibly see another's.
I'd agree with the previous comment about quirckyness; we have had to develop a fair amount of technique / supporting code for things like casading parameters behaviour's in the report viewer etc.
Best of luck - it does work if you stick with it; our customers love the portal and it will get better with the advances in Sharepoint foundation 2010.
There is a company in Chicago ( DMC - www.dmcinfo.com/sharepoint ) who has SharePoint Dashboard solution that integrates with a variety of data sources (e.g. Dynamics, CRM, Goldmine, QuickBooks, SharePoint Lists, etc.). It works with both WSS (free SharePoint) and MOSS (premium SharePoint). You may want to try asking them.
Related
I've been using SSRS 2012 for a while now. Keep in mind I'm currently using SSRS 2012 but have set up a 2016 server and will be migrating about 200 reports within the next few months. Just went to PBI training and found out about the new Power BI Server that can sit on top of SSRS. Exciting in that we're in healthcare and cannot use the PBI publishing service for HIPAA reasons. But, I wanted to be sure I understand some things:
In SSRS, you can create a datasource and datasets that are used
regularly for efficiency and to keep down storage sizes. In
PBIRServer, it appears that you create each datasource and the
individual datasets used and store separately for each report. Is
this accurate and doesn't that seem like a step back?
Can I include SSRS reports and BPI reports/dashboards on the same
site?
If we're going to set up a local PBIRServer, can we develop using
PBIpro with about 5-10 pro users but then let the folks that
basically just want to view data use the free version?
If we develop using PBIpro can we still publish to the PBIRServer
with mobile formats? Documentation seems to indicate we need a
different development tool with a much higher cost.
Can you include a hyperlink from PBIRServer reports/dashboards that
to a specific report on the same server? I’m seeing this being used
via PBI for the visuals and then the drill-down-to as the existing
SSRS reports. They’re working great for our current purposes.
Is there a publication that articulates some of these specifics?
Thanks so much!
I think the first thing to keep in mind is that reportserver 2016 and power bi reportserver 2016 are different products. Licensing Power BI reportserver can only be obtained by either buying power bi premium capacity or have an enterprise sql server with Software Assurance
PBI premium: Costprice for this will be 5000$ a month
power bi price calculator
SQL Server Enterprise: $14,256 per corepack , 2 are required + SA
I can't answer all other question, but for question 2:
Yes you can deploy power bi and regular reports to a pbiRS server.
Question 3:
When you develop locally you have to use the power bi desktop for reporting services. To deploy this to a pbi RS you are not required to have a pbi pro license. Since you are using on premise resources, you will follow the licensing model of sql reportserver. The users connecting to the reportserver are no power bi users, just regular ssrs consumers install power bi desktop for report services
If I understand your questions well, you might need to install both, depending on organization size, report creators number and report users number.
SSRS for those people who are OK using standard reports only (with exposed datasources and standard layout design tool) so SSRS yes included with your SQL Server license
Power BI Report Server (SQL Enterprise+Assurance or PBI Premium license) for more sophisticated reports for business people; but to design/publish these reports you need Power BI Pro licence, per report developer
I want to kow what is the different between Sharepoint fast search service and Sql server fulltext search?
Or Can I abstract the Sharepoint fast search from the Sharepoint platform as a isolate component?
Thank you.
David
Well they have nothing in common and FAST is a search engine either implemented and integrated in SharePoint or used standalone. In SharePoint 2010 FAST was sold as an additional component while it is standard in SharePoint 2013. Microsoft purchased the company building FAST a couple of years ago and have kept some 70-80% of the technology in SharePoint 2013.
I believe you still can buy the FAST Search Server as a standalone product but would not quite understand why since the SharePoint version of FAST is way easier to work with.
My team which is a part of a university needs me to develop a web based application for them which can be accessed by any team member. However the university doesn't provide us with a database.
We do have a portion in their server but that's for our public website. Even if I put the application on that server, I need to have a database. I can't use an excel sheet for storing all the data cause it will be huge. I am looking for an optimal solution.
Never fear there are a number of non RDBMS (Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL Server, etc.) solutions around.
You can try many of the document databases under No-SQL banner, with some popular options being:
RavenDB if you are developing your web application in the Microsoft stack.
MongoDB is a great well supported open source document database.
BaseX or Sedna are useful XML databases.
Alternately you can look to Cloud (some offer free services, others are commercial and will need to pay for) databases such as:
Amazon RDS
Elasticsearch
Windows Azure
Choose:
http://www.sqlite.org/
http://www.db4o.com/
Both will give you a database ability with no prior machine configuration or setup package.
For a small team group, specially with no more than 3 developers, I would recommend you to look at CloudBees. They offer a free tier where you can have on the same platform a repository, a Continuous Integration tool, so you can build and test your app every time you do a commit, and a runtime environment where you can deploy a Java, a Play or a PHP application. You can also create free databases.
In the case you wanted to have a visual git repository, you can use GitHub and link your source code with your Jenkins job.
In this way, you don't need multiple tools for your development environment.
I have been looking into PowerPivot and concluded that for "self service BI" and ahoc buidling of cubes it has its uses. In particular I like the enhanced UI that you get from using PowerPivot rather than just using a PivotTable hooked up to an analysis services datasource.
However it seems that hooking up PowerPivot to an existing analysis services cube is not a solution for "organisational BI". It is not always desireable to suck millions of rows into excel at once and the interface between PowerPivot and analysis services is very poor in my book.
Hence the question is can an existing analysis services solution get the enhanced ui features that power pivot brings, without using powerpivot as the design tool? If powerpivot is aimed at self service/personal BI then it seems bizare that the UI for this is better than for bigger/more costly analysis services solutions.
Although I agree that PowerPivot has a nicer UI than using Analysis Services via standard pivot tables, PowerPivot through the Excel client has some really bad drawbacks when trying to use it in lieu of Analysis Services.
You have to download all the rows into your spreadsheet to "refresh" the data. In large data warehouses, this is equivalent to having users run SELECT * queries directly against your database. It's horribly slow for the user and has a high resource usage cost to your server.
It is extremely easy for someone to either intentionally or unintentionally walk out of the office with your entire data warehouse in a non-secure manner. Ouch!
The end-user machines need to be pretty powerful. I tried using PowerPivot with a few small tables (5 million rows or less) on our standard company machine build and it did not have sufficient memory to refresh PowerPivot. The only way I can see to deploy PowerPivot across the enterprise is to upgrade all of the analyst machines to 64-bit Windows 7 with at least 6GB to 8GB of RAM. Although this can be feasible in a small organization, it is not a reasonable solution in a large enterprise.
You won't have any good metrics on how people are using your data if you hand out PowerPivot with unrestricted access to your data warehouse. Yes, you may have metrics on how frequently people hit the refresh button and you may be able to log which tables they are querying, but you won't see how they use the data unless you audit their spreadsheets directly. And even then, you will only get their final result -- not their path to how they got to the final result.
PowerPivot generates really, really big files. Even if someone drills the data down to a small subset of the total data, it is still difficult to share the files with others since large PowerPivot files generally exceed minimum Exchange server file size limits. I've encountered this at my organization despite never having had this problem with an Analysis Services files.
PowerPivot does not have a very good security model. Sure, you can restrict who gets to the data the first time, but you can't restrict it once it is in the spreadsheet. Analysis Services prevents users from making changes to the spreadsheet if they don't have access to the underlying cube. It's just so easy to compromise the security of your most valuable business data with PowerPivot.
PowerPivot does not currently scale for very large data sources. I have several multi-billion fact tables that just can't be downloaded by PowerPivot unless I pre-aggregate them down to a few hundred million rows. PowerPivot works really well for small data warehouses, but it doesn't elegantly scale to large data warehouses.
Please note my above comments don't apply to PowerPivot via SharePoint. I haven't tried the SharePoint integrated product out, but many of the above concerns seem to have been addressed from the documentation and demonstrations that I've seen of the SharePoint version of the product.
Despite all of the above comments, PowerPivot could work as a replacement for Analysis Services if you have a very small or immature data warehouse. If your largest fact table is a few million rows, then the overhead of building and maintaining a data warehouse may not be cost effective if you are a BI team of 1-2 people. PowerPivot is probably a great new feature for a department that doesn't have a dedicated BI team and only has a handful of Excel junky analysts. It doesn't take much sophistication to put together a virtual data mart from disparate data sources with PowerPivot. But if you want to build a truly professional data warehouse that is secure, scalable, and highly manageable, then I would recommend building cubes in Analysis Services and either use Excel or a 3rd party vendors tools for connecting to the Analysis Services OLAP cubes.
Now that SQL Server 2012 is released, you may want to take a look at using one or more SSAS BISM models, rather than PowerPivot. You get interop with PowerPivot, but you can now build your model using SSDT (in Visual Studio) and can get more control over security and can host on a dedicated server.
I'll be presenting live and online this spring and summer of the BISM - here's my latest deck on slideshare - http://www.slideshare.net/lynnlangit/sql-2012-bism
Now that Office 2013 preview is out, you can check out PowerView inside of Excel (PowerPivot) without the need to have SharePoint. It remains to be seen when MSFT will remove the dependency on Silverlight (i.e. move to HTML5). The preview release of Office 2013 that I got in September still included PowerPivot which required Silverlight. I am looking forward to the release built on HTML5. Here's a deck by Jen Underwood to give you an idea of what PowerView looks like.
WebPivotTable is a pure javascript pivot table and pivot chart component which can be used to pivot csv data and all kinds of OLAP cubes, include microsoft SSAS. It mimics all functionalities of Excel but web based, no dependence on any other plugins, drivers, server side compoenents. It can be easily to integrated into any web application and web sites.
Here is Demo and Documents
I know that Powerpivot is a free download for Excel 2010, but for a better desktop client experience you should look at the ProClarity client.
Also worth looking at Analyzer by Strategy Companion (http://www.strategycompanion.com).
I've found it provides a smooth web-based interface for slicing and dicing in pivot tables (and charts) that is nicer than what is provided by Excel 2007.
ProClarity was the runaway best option until Microsoft bought them and killed the product. Some of the features are making their way into other tools, but the product itself is no longer supported. Panorama or Tableau are probably the best 3rd party options.
This is the best I've found so far that is up-to-date: http://www.varigence.com/products/vivid/videos
Edit: http://silverlight.galantis.com is also a possible solution - WPF version comes out next month that could be used is a VSTO add-in.
Is there a simpler interface for end users to run "queries" on pre-existing SqlServer Analysis Service cubes? I'm looking for a way to deploy the cubes and allow the users to work with the data through a simpler interface than BIDS. Is this even possible?
I would recommend Excel too. It is an environment that your users are familiar with anyway, and they will be able to perform additional analysis (totals etc) without learning any new interfaces.
However, I would advise against pivot tables as a method of getting the data into Excel. I once worked on a project using pivot tables, and it was a filthy nightmare. The more recent versions of Office have a slightly different tool called "Microsoft Office Excel Add-in for SQL Server Analysis Services" which can get OLAP data into Excel. I downloaded XLAddinSetup.msi for Excel 2002/3 or you can use this method for Excel 2007.
You can use Excel with pivot tables for that, no need to write any queries at all, they can drill down to all the data they need
There's a couple of End User Reporting Tools around.
Our tool - RSinteract, is quite cheap and effective. It uses an AJAXy web interface so no need to install on the client and has drag and drop functionality similar to the other tools. It also has a 30 day evaluation.
There are many, many tools. An incomplete overview can be found here: http://www.ssas-info.com/analysis-services-client-tools-frontend
Dundas has a set of tools that let you drag and drop dimensions/hierarchies/measures to create visualizations like charts and/or grids. The product name is Dundas Chart for ASP.NET Enterprise Edition, and it has a free demo.
ProClarity also had a suite of tools. Not sure how you get those tools any longer, but I think they are part of MSDN now.
As stated by Jay, there are several client tools you can use to query the cubes that give the end user the ability to drag and drop dimensions for ad-hoc querying.
ProClarity has been acquired by Microsoft, and most of the functionality is being incorporated into PerformancePoint
Panorama Software (original developers of Analysis Services) also provide access with their NovaView products
Another option is Report Builder, that comes for free with SQL Server.
Though the SQL Server 2005 version is a bit cranky, the new release with SQL Server 2008 seems to work much better.
Although it isn't as flexible as excel for ad-hoc queries,it comes very handy for some scenarios.