Who is the King of SharePoint BI & reporting tools?

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Over the past few years, Business Intelligence and Insights in SharePoint has become one of the most desired features especially for enterprise customers. The user voice on improved reporting features for content and usage of SharePoint has led to several ground-breaking tools including Microsoft very own Power BI which is one of the leaders in the market. However, there are lots of other players in the market with innovative auditing and insights capabilities who are trying to become the king of SharePoint BI and reporting kingdom. Each of them comes with a great list of features and provides visually appealing reports as well as innovative ways of data modelling to implement business intelligence in SharePoint. In this article, we will take a look at some of the best BI tools available, there pros and cons and which one deserves to be called the king of SharePoint BI and reporting.

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What went down at the SharePoint Conference Las Vegas 2019

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SharePoint conference “SPC” is one of the biggest event in SharePoint world which took place in Las Vegas this year focusing on SharePoint, O365, OneDrive and relative technologies including Yammer, Microsoft Stream and Power BI. It was an action-packed three days full of new feature announcements, workshops and learning sessions which started off with a keynote from Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for OneDrive, SharePoint and Office in which he introduced some of the latest and greatest innovations from Microsoft which allows organizations to improve employee engagement as well as empowering them to achieve more in the modern workplace with Microsoft O356. Below are some of the key features/improvements announced during the conference.

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Power BI using SharePoint List VS SQL Tables

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Power BI is a no code analytics and reporting tool from Microsoft which allows business users to generate sleek and customizable reports and interact quickly and easily with their data using simple drag-and-drop features. It is an extremely feature rich yet user-friendly reporting tool which can also be used for creating live dashboards and then sharing them with your colleagues or embed them in your app, website, or SharePoint portal. It is compatible with over 65 different data sources out of the box including both on-premises and cloud products.

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Comparison of BI Tools: Power BI vs Cognos vs Crystal Reports vs SSRS

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Which is the best Business Intelligence (BI) tool available? Why is it the best and what distinguishable features makes it the best one? What are the alternatives? What is the current client base of this tool? Is this BI tool the right one for your business as well? What should you be looking for when evaluating BI tools? Will your business analyst or end users be capable enough to extract desired information from this tool?

In this blog, we evaluated some of the most popular BI tools out there, provided an overview and compared features, hopefully helping you to make the right choice of BI tool to meet your business requirements. A first step to finding the best tool for your company.

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SharePoint as a Corporate Data Warehouse: Pros and Cons

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The current Corporate environment is continuously evolving. Organisations, whether small or enterprise, have their presence globally. Gone are the days where employees used to work from one dedicated seat in an office, now they work remotely.
Firms are under tremendous pressure to be productive. Employees should be able to collaborate easily and meet deadlines, not only timely but also qualitatively. On top of it, regulations impose ever deeper audits based on historical data.

This may sound simple and straightforward, but it is instead quite hard to achieve. Microsoft SharePoint could be a possible answer to the requirements above. It lets firms to meet the ever-changing needs, collaborate effectively and assist a lot in making better business decisions. The numbers speak for themselves: as per the data from Microsoft, over 350 companies from Fortune 500 are using SharePoint.

Still, as you store more and more corporate data into SharePoint, does it ensure that it will suit all your needs? Let’s explore the pros and cons of SharePoint when being considered as a Corporate Data Warehouse.

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Building a SAP Crystal Report with SharePoint list data: How To

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When it comes to a reporting solution, Crystal Reports is the de facto standard in the reporting world.

In this blog we will cover how we can generate a Crystal report based on data from a SharePoint List. To do this we will first export the data from the SharePoint list to SQL Server using SQList. Once the data is exported in SQL Server, we will use Crystal Reports to create reports using the exported data. The data export process from SharePoint lists to SQL Server can be configured to be either a continuous process or an On-demand one. So, you can choose either from them depending whether you want the generated reports to be in sync as any point of time or only at specific time.

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Using Tableau to report on SharePoint lists and libraries: A step by step guide

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Tableau is one of the most renowned and accepted Business Intelligence tool for visually analysing the data by organisations all over the world. Tableau allows its users to create and distribute an interactive dashboard depicting the trends, variations, and density of the underlying data either in the form of graphs or charts. Tableau can connect to almost all types of data sources for fetching data. Data sources can be files, relational and Big Data; once the data is fetched it can be processed to meet the needs. Moreover, it allows data blending and real-time collaboration, which makes it very unique.

In this blog, we will cover:

  • How to generate a Tableau report using data from a SharePoint List
  • How we can integrate this Tableau report into a Modern SharePoint Site
  • How to create a replication from the SharePoint list to SQL Server using SQList. This will create all the schema and keep the SQL data and schema in sync with the SharePoint list.

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