Today I had the pleasure of presenting to the Higher Ed Data Warehousing and BI Group. We discussed the long list of new features and enhancements included with SQL Server Reporting Services 2016. The webinar has been recording and I’ve uploaded it to YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

If you’d like to download my PowerPoint slide deck, you can do that here.

And you can download my portal brand package here.

Questions

There were a couple questions that were asked during the webinar today that I wanted to take a chance to answer.

Q. Can you use ADFS with SSRS and SSAS?

A. I wanted to expand upon my answer to this question during the session. SSAS only supports windows authentication so there’s the answer for that. SSRS can support claims authentication if you’re running SSRS in SharePoint Integrated Mode. There’s a lot more information on this subject here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15274.using-claims-authentication-across-the-microsoft-bi-stack.aspx.

Q. Is pinning SSRS visuals to Power BI a Power BI Pro license feature?
No, pinning an SSRS visual can be performed by a free user. Yay!

Q. What are the differences between Enterprise and Standard Edition?

Standard Edition does not include Mobile Reports, KPIs, portal custom branding, data driven subscriptions, and a few other things. So basically if you want most of the cool new features, you need to be on Enterprise. At least Standard gives you the ability to pin SSRS charts to Power BI and use the new sunburst and tree map charts. Standard Edition also does not include Power View for SSRS SharePoint integrated mode. For more in depth information, check out this link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993.aspx#SSRS

Resources

Download the PowerPoint slide deck I used in the presentation:
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AhE1N6_BN93Lkodr7OHhNt5lpnWwmg

Download my SSRS portal brand package here:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AhE1N6_BN93LkoVArngW2L70ndxOCg

Here’s the MSDN documentation on what’s new in SSRS 2016: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms170438.aspx

Download an evaluation of SQL Server 2016 and take the new SSRS for a spin: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-sql-server-2016

SQL Server Editions feature comparison (in-depth):
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993.aspx

Feedback

I hope you enjoyed the video! Let me know what you think and if you have any comments or questions. And if you enjoyed the video, share it so others can enjoy it, too.