Planning of Power BI portal vs Sharepoint

[Off2w0rk]

Hi all,

im pretty new to power Bi, but fell in love with it recently. Usually my daily work is to manage Skype,Exchange and Office365. I have some Sharepoint Online experience, but lack of Power  BI.

I plan to setup Power BI in our company but dont know where to start.

There seems to be an own template for Power Bi in Sharepoint Online. There we can upload Power Bi files and connect to power Bi portal.

In power Bi portal, you can only upload files but not download?Its only used for show cases?

Is it ment to use Sharepoint/One drive for storage instead?

Is is best practise to have own server dedicated for Power Bi reporting?

What is recommended and not recommended?

thanks!

[Greg_Deckler]

@Off2w0rk - I'm not sure to what you are referring when you say "template for Power BI in SharePoint Online", can you elaborate? There is the Enterprise | Business Intelligence Center site template and the old O365 Power BI site (which I understand is being retired soon).

In Power BI Service, you can upload datasets or connect to files stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive. You are correct in that currently once you upload a dataset, you cannot download it, only refresh it. If you load up an Excel file or PBIX in SharePoint Online or OneDrive, you can use "Connect" and then you can use the data in the Power BI Service but still be able to download the raw data from SharePoint or OneDrive.

Currently, Power BI reporting is really done through the Service, a cloud SaaS portal. This is changing in SQL 2016 SSRS, there will essentially be an on-premises publishing point for Power BI.

Things are in flux for a lot of things in terms of Power BI, recommendations today may be invalid tomorrow.

[Off2w0rk]

@Greg_Deckler thanks for your prompt reply.

Regarding Sharepoint template is when you create new site collection, there is a template called Business intelligence Center. When use this template there is an app available for connecting to power BI. As of now, it seems like just another document/resource library where you can upload files. I guess it can be used to import from power BI portal(like onedrive).

Maybe its ment for storage of organization Power BI files?

[Greg_Deckler]

That template dates way, way back to like the SharePoint 2010 days, it wasn't created with Power BI in mind at all and to my knowledge doesn't really integrate with it whatsoever unless they have updated that template.