Web Part – The White Pages

SharePoint and the New SSRS/PBIRS Native Mode Report Viewer Web Part

Published September 22, 2017

When SQL Server 2016 was released, I wrote a post that covered how to integrate SharePoint 2016 with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) in native mode. I wrote that post because although SSRS was still available in SharePoint Integrated Mode, many of the new features were only in Native mode. It also wasn’t difficult to surmise that Integrated mode had a limited lifespan at that point, a fact that was confirmed in November 2016.

As my integration article pointed out, one of the glaring problems integrating Native mode with SharePoint was that the Native Mode web part had significantly less capability than the one that was available with Integrated mode, not to mention the fact that it was deprecated. Parameter support was first and foremost among those missing features. Organizations that had incorporated SSRS reports into their SharePoint based dashboards couldn’t just move to Native Mode, and those dashboards relied heavily on the ability to pass parameter values to the SSRS reports through the web part. SSRS did make it easier to embed reports into pages without a web part through the rs:Embed URL directive, but there was no real way to make that dynamic.

The introduction of Power BI Report Server (PBIRS), and its ability to render Power BI reports also left the SharePoint dashboard folks without a solution. Although PBIRS is a superset of SSRS, it is only available in Native Mode, in fact, there’s no longer any need to mention modes. SharePoint dashboards that used SSRS report components were stuck at the 2016 version.

Until now.

Today, Microsoft unveiled the new, fully capable SSRS/PBIRS Report Viewer web part for SharePoint.

Integrated Mode	Native Mode

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” – Pete Townshend

The web part allows paginated reports from either SSRS in Native mode, or Power BI Report Server to be embedded into a SharePoint page. Essentially, it brings all the capabilities of the integrated mode web part to the native mode web part. Organizations that have bet on SSRS running in Integrated mode can now seamlessly move their reports to SSRS Native mode, or to Power BI Report Server. Let’s have a quick look at some of the details.

Parameter and view support

All the options that we’ve come to expect from the integrated mode web part are here in the new web part. Toolbar options can be controlled at a fine level and web parts can be connected to pass in parameter values. In fact, as seen above, the only difference between the two modes now is the report location option.

C2WTS and Kerberos required… unless

With Integrated mode, Kerberos constrained delegation (KCD) was only required if you needed the user’s identity passed back to the data source. This was because Integrated mode and SharePoint itself shared the same access mechanism. Native mode and PBIRS have their own membership providers, and this new (server side) web part needs to connect to the report server itself to authenticate the user. This is an additional “hop” and therefore requires Kerberos constrained delegation. This only gets the user as far as the report server itself. To get the user’s identity further downstream, KCD will also need to be set up between the report server and data source(s).

SharePoint 2016 in most cases uses claims authentication, and SSRS/PBIRS does not. This also means that the Claims to Windows Token Service (C2WTS) must also be running in your SharePoint environment. This allows the user’s NTLM identity to be extracted and sent via KCD to the SSRS/PBIRS server.

There is one case where KCD is not required, and that is when SSRS is running on a machine in the SharePoint farm along with C2WTS. In a small environment, this may be suitable, but if scaling is a factor, you may need to crack open your Kerberos books.

Paginated reports only

Even though SSRS supports the new RSMobile report format, and PBIRS also now supports both Interactive (Power BI) and analytical (Excel) reports, this web part is only built to render paginated reports. Up until 2016, paginated was the only report type supported by SSRS, so this will not be a problem for those looking to move forward. However, for those people that are looking to embed these other formats in SharePoint on premises, there are other options.

Both Power BI and mobile reports can be embedded into a SharePoint page using the script editor web part alongside the rs:Embed=true URL directive. Parameters can be passed to mobile reports using this technique, and text filters can be passed to interactive reports as well. Excel reports can be embedded with the Excel Services web part, the way that they always have which itself allows for passing slicer values. However, for this to work, the Excel files need to be stored in SharePoint, not PBIRS.

On-premises only

The new web part deploys to the SharePoint farm as a WSP solution file, which means that this is an on-premises solution only. Given that SSRS/PBIRS are also on-premises products, this shouldn’t pose much of a problem. It IS possible to ebbed on prem reports into SharePoint Online pages with the script editor web part for classic pages, and the embed web part for modern pages. A complete summary of report/SharePoint edition embed options can be seen below.

Report type	SharePoint Online modern page	SharePoint Online classic page	SharePoint on-premises
PBIX on Power BI Service	Power BI WP	Anonymous*	Anonymous*
PBIX on PBIRS	Modern embed content WP	Script editor WP	Script editor WP
RDL on PBIRS or SSRS Native	Modern embed content WP	Script editor WP	Report Viewer WP ^NEW!
RDL on SSRS Integrated mode	Modern embed content WP	Script editor WP**	SSRS WP
XLSX (stored in SharePoint)	N/A	Excel Services WP	Excel Services WP
RSMobile on SSRS/PBIRS (Native)	Modern embed content WP	Script editor WP**	Script editor WP

* NOT recommended

** Requires adding sever to HTML Field Security options in site collection settings

In summary, the new native mode web part will be very welcome for those organizations that have been feeling stranded by the deprecation of SharePoint Integrated mode. The very fact that it is now available also underscores that SharePoint still plays an important role in the Microsoft Business Intelligence ecosystem. It may no longer be a prerequisite, but it still adds value, and those are both very good things.

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What License is Needed to Use the Power BI Web Part?

Published August 21, 2017

The Power BI web part is now a part of SharePoint online for the majority of Office 365 users. This web part allows Power BI reports to be embedded on SharePoint pages, putting them in greater context. These web parts are rendered on the client, not on the server like old style web parts, which means that they are rendered by the consuming user, not the server. This means that in order for the report to render properly, the user needs to not only have access to the report, but also needs to be licensed for it.

The Power BI web part is a feature that requires a Pro license for both producers and consumers. This actually makes sense given that any sharing features in Power BI require Pro. Also, given that the consuming user must have access to the report, the report will be contained in a Group workspace, and Group workspaces themselves require a Pro license. So, what happens when a non Pro user opens a SharePoint page containing a Power BI web part report?

Quite simply, the content doesn’t show up.

Premium Capacity

However, on June 1, 2017, the premium pricing model for Power BI became available. Premium allows organizations to purchase premium capacity in the service. When reports are deployed to this premium capacity, users can access these reports without a Pro license. The act of publishing the report still requires a Pro license, but viewing it does not. Therefore, the Pro requirement for the web part goes away if the report is deployed to premium capacity.

This is in fact how it works. To date, I have seen no official announcement or post from Microsoft on this topic. The closest thing is a response to a forum post in the Power BI community forums:

“If the if the user that is trying to consume the embedded report does not have a Power BI Pro license but is part of a Power BI Premium instance, same viewer rights apply meaning that the user can view the report but collaboration features such as Analyze from Excel are not available, in line with regular Power BI Premium related features.”

The bottom line is that in most cases, all users, both producers and consumers will need a Power BI Pro license to be able to use the Power BI web part. The only time that this is not the case is when an organization has purchased premium capacity, and the report is deployed to that capacity. In that case, only the producer requires a Pro license. It should also be noted that in this case, some features (like export data) will still not be available to the free users.

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SharePoint and Power BI – Better Together

Published September 30, 2016

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.

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