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Power BI Report Server : An On-Premises Report hosting Suite

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by Danish Ali Detho | O365 & Power Platform Solution Architect///

Power BI has become the most widely used tool for reporting due its user-friendly interface which allows business users to generate sleek and customizable reports and interact quickly and easily with their data using simple drag-and-drop features and a plethora of customizable visualizations.  Power BI Service further extended the capabilities by providing a robust report hosting cloud-based SaaS platform through which reports can be easily shared with colleagues for collaboration and made more accessible. However, if your organization has an on-premises setup and doesn’t want to set up a Gateway to expose the reports to the cloud then Power BI Service cant be used for hosting reports and an OnPremises hosting server would be required. In order to provide similar functionality to the on-premises users, Microsoft has introduced Power BI Report Server which uses SQL Server Reporting Services technology for hosting reports On-Premises. In this blog, we will take a deeper look at the Power BI report server, its features, and functionality, and how it is compared with Power Bi Service.

Power BI: A reporting tool like no other

Microsoft Power BI is a desktop-based reporting tool that enables you to collect, filter, combine, analyze and visualize and finally publish your data in form of a report or a collection of reports called Dashboard. Power BI provides a simple and user-friendly interface that can be used by business and power-users easily. Also, it allows for collecting data from a wide range of data sources. If you’re a business or power user who wants to work robustly on the data of your organization, then you will be using Power BI Desktop which is free to download.

Power BI Report Server: An On-premises Power BI Service alternative

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises report distribution technology offered by Microsoft Power BI Deployment Suit that is primarily used for hosting and sharing Power BI reports. Since it should be hosted on the machine in the company’s domain, it’s not an online service and therefore allows organizations to host and share reports OnPremises. It comes with a web portal which is an entry point to access Power BI reports and provides additional tools to create and host Power BI reports paginated reports, mobile reports, and KPIs. It consists of a web portal that provides features to view Power BI reports, paginated reports, Excel files, and KPIs, and navigate through the elements in your report server instance. You can also use the web portal to administer a single report server instance.

How it works

Note: Do check out the  Hardware and Software Requirements for installing Power BI Report Server.

  • Install and configure the Report Server by following the installation guide.
  • Develop Power BI reports using Power BI Desktop.
  • Once the report is ready, Publish it to the report server.
  • Once the report is available in Report Server, share it with other colleagues.

Power BI Report Server vs Power BI Service

Capability Report Server Power BI Service
Hosting Technology On-Premises Cloud-based (SAAS)
Data sources Cloud and/or on-premises Cloud and/or on-premises
Sharing Reports Yes Yes
Access reports via Power BI Mobile App Yes Yes
Setup Row Level Security (RLS) Yes Yes
Creating Dashboards No Yes
Setup Data Alerts No Yes
Usage of R and Python Engine No Yes
Connectivity to Azure Machine Learning No Yes

Main Features

  • A centralized report server for hosting Power BI reports or Paginated reports (.rdl) on-premises so that they can be shared with other users for collaboration.
  • Allow Users to access reports on a web portal and set up access permissions.
  • Additional visualizations are available for reports hosted on the report server.
  • Allows users to access reports on their cell phones using Power BI Mobile App.

Licensing Requirements

Power BI Report Server is available through two different licenses:

  1. Power BI Premium
  2. SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance.

Note: If you publish Power BI reports to Power BI Report Server, you also need a Power BI Pro license. You don’t need a Power BI Pro license to view and interact with Power BI reports on Power BI Report Server.

Conclusion

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises reporting server based on SQL Server Reporting Services technology which allows users to host their interactive reports fully on-premises without needing a Power BI website. You will not need a gateway, and all types of connections (Scheduled Refresh, DirectQuery, and Live Connection) are supported (Except the composite model). It does lack a lot of features if you compare it with Power BI Service but it does offer enough capabilities to make it desirable for organizations who want to keep their Power BI reports on-premises but are still able to share them with users.

 

AxioWorks SQList is now available online

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We have launched SQList Online! The cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) version of SQList, our on-prem application that makes it extremely easy for organizations to store and synchronize SharePoint On-prem/SharePoint Online data into SQL Server databases, allowing them to efficiently generate reports using their preferred reporting tools like Power BI, Excel, or SSRS by connecting directly to SQL tables.
In this article, we will take a look at how to set up your account for SQList Online and then how to set up your fist replication.

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Microsoft Power Platform

What’s coming in Power Platform Release wave one of 2022

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by Danish Ali Detho | O365 & Power Platform Solution Architect///

Due to the ever-rising popularity of the Power platform, Microsoft continues to focus on improving the usability and versatility of the Power Platform in order to make it more pro-developer friendly and to assist them in addressing and implementing use cases using low-code to no code components. We saw a host of new features released in MS Ignite last year and Microsoft continues to build on top of it by adding some great new features and improvements in the next release wave of Power Platform which will include some major updates in all the components of Power platform. In today’s blog, we will take a look at some of the most exciting new features coming up in three major components of the power platform Power-BI, PowerApps, and Power Automate which are scheduled to be released in wave one (April 2022 to September 2022).

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AxioWorks blog -Microsoft Lists

Five most awesome features in MS Lists

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by Danish Ali Detho | O365 & Power Platform Solution Architect///

Microsoft Lists previously known as SharePoint Lists have been widely used for maintaining and storing data in SharePoint and its usage has grown even more ever since it has been integrated into MS Teams. Microsoft has recently introduced some exciting new features in MS Ignite which makes MS Lists a must-use tool for storing and maintaining information for business users and it’s not just limited to O365 as well. In this blog, I will share 5 of the most exciting MS List features which help users achieve greater productivity and collaborate efficiently.

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What went down in MS Ignite 2021 : Power Apps Edition

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by Danish Ali Detho | O365 & Power Platform Solution Architect///

When we talk about the biggest annual tech conferences of the year, Microsoft Ignite comes to mind where not only do we get a view of all their product road maps but it is also jam-packed with some great features for every product and this year was no different. This year at Microsoft Ignite, More than 90 new services and updates were introduced including some great new features for each component of  Microsoft Power Platform boosting productivity and bringing innovation to low-code app development and automation for citizen developers, business analysts, IT admins, and professional developers. In this blog, we will cover the most exciting new features of Power Apps introduced in MS Ignite.

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What went down in MS Ignite 2021 : Power BI Edition

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by Danish Ali Detho | O365 & Power Platform Solution Architect///

When we talk about the biggest annual tech conferences of the year, Microsoft Ignite comes to mind where not only we get a view of all their product road maps but it is also jam packed with some great  features for every product and this year was no different. This year at Microsoft Ignite, More than 90 new services and updates were introduced including some great new features for each component of  Microsoft Power Platform boosting productivity and bringing innovation to low-code app development and automation for citizen developers, business analysts, IT admins, and professional developers. This blog is the first in the series of blogs covering the most interesting features introduced for each Power Platform component in Ms Ignite starting off with Power BI.

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Why use SQList to generate Power BI reports from SharePoint lists, rather than using the Power BI native connector to SharePoint?

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The main reason is that in practical terms using the native connector only works for small amount of data and simple queries. When you start using it on lists with many thousands of items and/or want to run queries across many large lists, you soon hit limitations in terms of amount of data you can query and the time it takes to execute them.

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SharePoint Online List vs SQL Server as Data Source in Power-BI

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Lists are primarily used as a source of data storage in the world of SharePoint and in most scenarios these lists can grow really fast especially if we are dealing with transactional data or a large store of reference data. As the SharePoint List grows and eventually goes over 5000 items, it becomes what we call a Large List. Large lists have their fair share of obstacles most of which can be dealt with using list views and indexing columns however when it comes to reporting on these lists using a tool like Power BI there is no easy way to avoid the performance deficiency and the overhead.

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AxioWorks Newsletter

AxioWorks Newsletter July 2021: We’ve expanded!

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Hello Reader,

Welcome to another exciting issue of our monthly Newsletter!

Each month, we try our best to bring to you content that is relevant and beneficial for you. So, if you would like us to cover any specific SQList feature or if you want to learn more about any SharePoint feature then please do let us know.

What has AxioWorks been up to?

The main focus of this month has been the SQList update planned to be released by the end of September 2021. In order to deliver the best possible product, we need to hear back from our customers, so the past one month we have been gathering feedback to help us establish the customers’ needs and preferences. We have been fortunate to hear that our product has been beneficial to a large variety of industries, and we will keep working hard to make sure that our customers’ needs are met accordingly.

Another exciting focus for AxioWorks this month has been our team expansion. We are proud to introduce the hiring of two Software Engineers through AcuGMS, as well as a brand new Sales and Marketing Manager. Welcome to the team, Ella, Akshay, and Uttam! With their help, we will be be able to close new partnerships, provide better customer service and product support.

Focus blog entry: SharePoint Spaces: Empowering enterprises to build Virtual Reality solutions

The World is moving towards virtual reality which is considered by most tech gurus as one of the technologies of the future. The capabilities offered by this somewhat magical technology are beyond the realm of the traditional way of how we perceive the designing of websites/pages as it will allow the site users to be fully immersed in the VR-enabled site pages. From an end-user perspective, this means rich interactions and capabilities which were not possible before, and from a website designer point of view, it will provide a completely new real estate to work on and they will no longer be bound to a 2D canvas which means they can be a lot more creative and innovative with their designs.

Read all about it in this month’s article: SharePoint Spaces: Empowering enterprises to build Virtual Reality solutions.

SQList feature of the month: Service Monitor Dashboard

Previously, the only way to check the status of lists which are being replicated via SQList was through Event Logs which was a bit tedious specially if you have multiple lists in each replication. Similar, it was difficult to troubleshoot if you have any errors in one of the lists being replicated as well.

In SQList 7.0, we have introduced a new feature called Service Monitor Dashboard which gives you a bird eye view of all the lists which are being replicated along with their progress. It also provides a quick way to see if there are any error during the replication process. You can also access the event logs for any specific list by double clicking on the list in case of any error(s).

If you want to know more details about this feature, check out the video blog explaining how it works: AxioWorks SQList Service Monitor Dashboard

Featured articles

Here is a small selection of interesting articles from the net.

Optimizing SharePoint performance in Microsoft 365

With great backend service power comes great productivity. Over the years, we’ve tuned SharePoint in Microsoft 365 to deliver turbocharged experiences. We’ve invested billions of dollars across research and engineering to drive massive improvements to the capabilities, performance, scalability, and security when working with documents, sites, integrated email, and chat content experiences, plus fast, efficient desktop sync.
Read more…

Site templates are coming to SharePoint Online

Microsoft is introducing scenario-based site templates in SharePoint online. This new SharePoint release of scenario-based site templates will help you expand what’s possible with content, pages, and web parts while helping you quickly get started building your own site.
Read more…

Top 80 SharePoint Blogs and Websites To Follow in 2021

Well…the title says it all.
Read more…

Let us know what you think about this newsletter
(it only takes a click…)

That’s all folks, till next time.

SharePoint Spaces: Empowering enterprises to build Virtual Reality solutions

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by Danish Ali Detho | O365 & Power Platform Solution Architect///

The World is moving towards virtual reality which is considered by most tech gurus as one of the technologies of the future. The capabilities offered by this somewhat magical technology are beyond the realm of the traditional way of how we perceive the designing of websites/pages as it will allow the site users to be fully immersed in the VR-enabled site pages. From an end-user perspective, this means rich interactions and capabilities which were not possible before, and from a website designer point of view, it will provide a completely new real estate to work on and they will no longer be bound to a 2D canvas which means they can be a lot more creative and innovative with their designs. All the major enterprise solution providers are looking into different ways of bringing VR into enterprise space but Microsoft is leading the charge in bringing 3D and VR features to its Microsoft 365 customers via SharePoint Spaces. In this article, we will take an in-depth look at what SharePoint spaces has to offer, how to set them up in your SharePoint sites and how businesses can use them.

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