September 2016 – The White Pages

Ever since 2007, SharePoint has included Business Intelligence amongst its core workloads. There have been a variety of approaches to the workload over the years, but today those core workloads include Excel Services/Excel Online, PerformancePoint, SQL Server Reporting Services Integrated Mode, and Power Pivot for SharePoint.

Power Pivot for SharePoint and Excel Services go hand in hand and can really be considered as one of the main pillars, leaving us with three. If we quickly examine these three pillars in SharePoint 2016, it’s pretty easy to spot an emerging trend. Excel Services is gone from SharePoint 2016, its capabilities being added to Excel Online. Excel Online connects to, but does not run on SharePoint. PerformancePoint still exists in 2016, but it has received precisely 0 new features – it is identical to the version in SharePoint 2013, and remains a part of product for legacy reasons. For all intents and purposes, I consider PerformancePoint to be deprecated. SSRS Integrated mode has been greatly improved in 2016, but contains nowhere near the improvements that the Native Mode version of SSRS has in 2016.

At the same time, the past year has witnessed the spectacular rise of Power BI. Power BI is clearly the focus area for Business Intelligence within Microsoft for cloud based BI delivery. Last fall the SQL team announced that on-premises customers were not being ignored, and that SSRS was the platform for on premises BI delivery They also sketched out a roadmap that showed both platforms being able to deliver the same type of reports. In June 2016, the team delivered on a portion of this vision with SQL Server 2016 Reporting Service.

So where does this leave SharePoint in the Business Intelligence ecosystem?

In my opinion, it leaves it right where it should be – as an integrating platform, and NOT as a runtime platform as it has been in the past. SharePoint provides in context BI by connecting content to reports, and providing dashboards connected to multiple sources. In 2016, SharePoint connects to Excel Online to deliver Analytical reports. Excel runs with SharePoint now, not on it. SSRS Integrated mode still runs on SharePoint, but the investments in Native mode are a clear indication to me that this will be the direction here as well. Unfortunately, Sharepoint has been lacking tight integration with Power BI.

The recent Ignite 2016 conference was the first public appearance of the Power BI web part.

Figure 1: Insert web part dialog with Power BI web part

The Power BI web part works with Modern Sharepoint pages and is based on the new SharePoint Framework (SPFx), which means that it is completely client-side. Why does this matter to us? The fact that it is completely client side means that it will work both in SharePoint Online and on premises. Initially, it will only work with SharePoint Online, but that is because the SharePoint Framework is currently unavailable on premises.

To use the new web part, first create or edit a Modern SharePoint page. The Modern pages support the new Modern web parts. Click on a “+” icon to open the insert part control (Figure 1). Once inserted, add the report URL, and the page. The report page should immediately render within the context of the SharePoint page.

Figure 2: Power BI Report page rendered within a SharePoint page

Since the web part is rendering client side, the consuming user obviously needs to have access to the report. This means that the source report must have been shared with them through Power BI dashboard sharing, or the report is in a group within which the consuming user is a member. This latter case makes the most sense given that all Office 365 Groups will have a corresponding Modern Team site. Embedding the report within group pages should “just work”.

The devil is of course in the details, and all of these details are not yet available, but Given the number of questions that I have received over the past year about Sharepoint/Power BI integration, I expect that its existence will come as welcome news. Over time I would expect to see it picking up support for parameters and the ability to work with individual report items (this is speculation, but it makes sense). It’s also not much of a stretch to see how SSRS could make available a Modern web part that worked in the same fashion with on premises SSRSs. That web part could conceivably work both on premises an Online, bringing SSRS to SharePoint Online for the first time.

SharePoint is still very much a platform for integration and for Business Intelligence content delivery. SSRS and Power BI will be the de facto reporting engines for on-premises and the cloud respectively, and Sharepoint will be the dashboarding/integrating platform for both environments.

15 Comments

“The reports of Yammer’s death are greatly exaggerated”

Ignite Attendee

Shortly after Microsoft purchased Yammer in the summer of 2012, it was all that the Office division could talk about. Yammer was to replace the conversation feed in SharePoint, the entire development team would adopt the quick shipping Yammer style, and we SharePoint MVPs were told that we were all Yammer MVPs. The conversation feed did in fact replace SharePoint’s in Office 365, and hooks were added to allow it to work with on-premises SharePoint. The SharePoint team moved to a quick shipping cloud first approach, but some time around 2014, the name Yammer was used less and less. At the 2015 Microsoft Ignite conference Yammer had a presence, but it was very muted compared to previous events. At the same time, a new conversations technology appeared in Office 365 Groups that was based on Exchange.

This trend led to a great deal of speculation that Yammer was on the wane. When Microsoft goes silent on a product, it normally means the end of it (Active X, Silverlight, SharePoint Designer, Silverlight). There are notable exceptions to this (SSRS), but it’s normally the case. However, at the same time they continued to make significant investments in it, and most of these investments were architectural (move data centres, Integration with Azure Active Directory). This has sent a very mixed message to the market – why would they continue to invest (heavily) in a dead product? It was almost as if they weren’t sure what to do with it, and were hedging their bets.

The Ignite 2016 conference has removed the mixed part of this messaging. Yammer is quite clearly the social strategy for Microsoft in Office 365. One needs only to look at the attention that Yammer received at the conference. At Ignite 2015, on the show floor, Yammer had a small pedestal with a single screen. It’s significantly larger at Ignite 2016.

There were a number of freebies being handed out. I haven’t seen a new Yammer T-shirt in years, and they were being handed out by the dozens. That itself is telling, but I found the iconography to be particularly interesting.

MVP Amy Dolzine

The renewed investment extended to the social events as well. The Yammer team hosted an event .

These investments are a clear sign, but what really matters is the product itself, and this is where the rubber hits the road. Yammer is becoming more and more tightly integrated with the Office 365 suite all of the time. A lot of architectural work has been done to facilitate this. In fact, next year, Microsoft will be dropping the standalone version of Yammer, and the Enterprise license along with it, making it first class component of Office 365. One look no further that the embedded Yammer conversation views:

In context Yammer conversations embedded in a SharePoint Publishing page

The above shows threaded discussions happening within the context of the content, in this case, a SharePoint publishing page. This is accomplished through the use of the new Yammer web part, which is built with the new SharePoint Framework, and delivered in Modern SharePoint pages. This feature is not available yet, but is coming very soon. The above image is not a mock -up. In fact, if you look at a list of modern web parts in a test environment today, there are only a couple that represent integration points – two of them stand out – Power BI, and Yammer.

Yammer is now an integral part of Office 365 Groups – another topic that was well represented at Ignite. I could attempt to articulate how this works, and why it matters, but this has already been done by Naomi Moneypenny here. There is also a Microsoft blog post discussing it available here. In a nutshell, Yammer will leverage all of the other Groups capabilities including SharePoint for document storage and OneNote for Notes capture, replacing its own native storage systems. Office 365 Groups will use Yammer for threaded discussions.

The approach to Yammer is different than the one we’ve become accustomed to. Yammer is to become an integral part of Office 365 Groups, providing the social component to the excellent content experience of Groups. Yammer becomes a part of a greater whole which, in my opinion is all to the good. Yammer has often been presented and used as a standalone solution. I’ve often felt that the threaded conversations in Yammer work well, but trying to use it for content management or event management is frustrating at best. Integration points between it and Office 365 have been poor to non-existent. The Yammer Add-in for SharePoint was recently removed from the store. Yammer groups have been different than Office 365 Groups leading to a disjointed experience. This is true no longer – now there are only Groups. The same group backing a SharePoint Team site backs Yammer’s social content. Yammer will also share OneDrive, OneNote and calendars, unifying all of the non-social content.

Yammer doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Month: September 2016

SharePoint and Power BI – Better Together

Microsoft Re-Adopts Yammer as a first class citizen