Microsoft Power BI Report Server August 2017 preview broadens data source support

Microsoft over the weekend released a preview of the next version of Power BI Report Server.

As Microsoft Senior Program Manager Christopher Finlan describes, the August 2017 preview release offers new self-service BI capabilities, "including support for data sources other than SQL Server Analysis Services and viewing and interacting with Excel Workbooks."

The June 2017 version of Power BI Report Server (announced along with Power BI Premium) offered the ability to publish Power BI reports on-premises by connecting to SQL Server Analysis Services data sources. Thus, users could deploy and distribute interactive Power BI reports within an organization's firewall. The same number of virtual cores an organization provisions in the cloud could also be deployed on-premises, without the need to split the capacity. So, an organization can elect to keep reports on-premise and move to the cloud at its own pace.

But users were vocal about their need to publish Power BI reports against other data sources.

With this new preview, users can create Power BI reports in Power BI Desktop that connect to any data source; then can publish their reports to Power BI Report Server. Finlan advises that no special configuration is required to enable this functionality:

Simply install and configure the August 2017 preview version of Power BI Report Server on your machine, and you're ready to go. You can then use the included Power BI Desktop application to connect to your data source(s), create your report, ...