BI Features in SharePoint 2016 On Premises

BI Features in SharePoint 2016 On Premises

The BI features in SharePoint 2016 on premises have been unified, enhanced and more scalable. Unlike in SharePoint 2013, where you had to make a choice between Excel Services and Excel Web App, in 2016 you get a single solution providing all Excel web functionality including Self-Service BI. You can Scale-out only the “Office Online Server” farm to enable all Office web applications and BI capabilities. This has limited impact on the main SharePoint Farm from the performance perspective.

Excel Online now matches all of the new features which its counterpart on the cloud, aka Office 365 provides.

Excel Services are now a part of Excel Online 2016. Excel Online on Office Online Server 2016 (OOS) was formerly known as Office Web Application (WAC) Server.

OOS is now a prerequisite for running Excel Services & Webparts. Without OOS, you will not be able to run (limited) any of the following services:

• Power Pivot
• Visio Services
• Reporting Services

OOS being a new unified service, provides scalability and performance.

Kerberos Delegation must be configured between SharePoint Server and OOS for Server-Server communication.

In order to leverage the entire MS BI stack, you need to deploy the complete solution based on SQL Server 2016 and SharePoint Server 2016 with the Add/On’s provided by SQL Server.

The upgrade product sequence is as follows:

1. AS 2016
2. OOS 2016
3. SharePoint 2016
4. SQL add-ons for SP 2016

See the Microsoft deployment guide for additional details.

In the next post, I will talk about the new SharePoint 2016 BI features.