Why Mobile Reports and Power BI Reports aren’t a zero sum decision in SQL Server Reporting Services

There are two questions I’ve gotten for months.  And with the first public preview of Power BI reports in SQL Server Reporting Services, they’ve grown louder in the past week or so.

“Will we be able to view Power BI reports hosted in SSRS in the Power BI mobile app?” (Yes, we’re planning to support that scenario)

“If so, why should I still use mobile reports?” (Sigh)

I’ll admit, I understand one of the biggest driving factors around this question is not wanting to “bet on the wrong horse”.  And yes, a major reason people are concerned about doing that is because of, well, Microsoft and some decisions made at various points in the company’s history around certain products.  But I can only offer my opinion on this particular question and what I’d tell a customer if they asked me question two today.

Recently, Power BI added the ability to create mobile optimized layouts for reports.  But no one has been asking if they should still create mobile optimized dashboards now that they have this new functionality.  Why not?  Because they aren’t really an either/or proposition.  You have a dashboard to give you an overview of your business metrics, and then can dig into more detail by clicking a tile and jumping into a report.  In the context of SQL Server Reporting Services, it’s probably better to compare the mobile report use case to Power BI dashboards rather than Power BI Reports.

By doing so, it helps customers avoid the single biggest issue people run into today with mobile reports (and previously Datazen).  What’s the issue exactly?  Well, they’re trying to use it to build reports the same way they do with Power BI Desktop.  They want interactive reports that allow drag and drop, ad-hoc analysis and can handle hundreds of thousands of records in a data model they build on the fly.  They did this previously because they didn’t have an option to run Power BI reports on-prem.  Now that they will, that shouldn’t be an issue any longer and they can use the best tool for that purpose, which is Power BI Desktop.

Similarly, there are certain use cases today where it may be advantageous to build a mobile report as my “dashboard”, instead of just building it in Power BI Desktop directly.  Today, a few of these include –

– I need my mobile report to be available for my users offline and still be fully interactive.  Power BI reports are viewable offline, but have certain limitations.

– I like having the thumbnail view of my mobile reports on devices for my users to see a quick preview of what the report looks like, especially in combination with KPI’s I’ve created.

– I can add URL’s that link to other content from items on my mobile report, or add url parameters to pass with that as well.

– Some users have specifically told me they like the fact they can add content from different data sources to a mobile report without building another data model.  Why?  They can then filter across all of those data sources in a mobile report, which I know some folks have wanted to see in the dashboards in Power BI.

– I need to view the reports in a mobile phone browser vs. the app.  For on-prem customers, there are often additional challenges having users leverage native apps to view the content vs. a web browser on the device.  The Mobile Reports will look the same in a phone browser as they will in the mobile app, and for some customers, that’s pretty important.

Sure, there are other benefits I get from mobile reports as well, including the whole “design first” option.  But doing a “feature shootout” as of today misses the point – I see mobile reports as a complimentary item to Power BI Reports, just as they are a complimentary item to paginated reports.  They give users an additional way to meet their customer’s needs, and could play a huge part in a customer’s solution, or no role at all.  And since we’ve already stated that adding Power BI dashboards is not on the short term roadmap, I feel very comfortable telling users there is a lot of business value you can derive out of using both options with SQL Server Reporting Services for the foreseeable future.

Now, could that change down the road?  Could Power BI Desktop becomes the single tool used to create mobile and paginated reports in addition to what it does today?  After all, we stated in our blogpost last year that “We intend to standardize reporting content types across Microsoft on-premises, cloud and hybrid systems.”  Does that mean we could consolidate everything into one tool as well?  I guess, but there’s a pretty healthy debate you can have on whether its better to have one tool to do everything, or specialized tools for each report type.  Trust me, I’ve been in this debate many times already.  And it’ll really depend on what it always does – what do our customers think is the best option moving forward?

There you have it – one man’s opinion on the subject.  And I’m sure there are people who will read this and disagree completely.  Great – I wouldn’t have it any other way.  🙂

Feel free to let me know what you think in the blog comments, and have a great week!