Jen Underwood from MS did an AWESOME job going through what mobility options exist for BI in Sharepoint 2013. Despite partially functional wireless and an alarm system glitch that drove screaming sirens, flashing lights and robotic, loud instructions, Jen was composed and cheerful.
The mobile BI capabilities were a bit light however.
Essentially, the near term strategy is to make certain SP 2010 and SP2013 are completely cross browser compatible. With SP2010 CU December 2011, iOS is fully supported. Android, iOS and almost everything else is supported out of the box in 2013. SSRS SQL 2012 SP1 (which I think releases this week) is fully supported in iOS (although it works well today even in older versions).
Here’s what you can do with mobile:
- Performance Point Services: In 2013, almost everything works completely cross-browser except for the Decomp Tree (its Silverlight so it doesn’t work on anything but IE).
- Excel Services: Everything works just fine.
- SSRS: Everything works with some limitations on calendar controls.
- PowerPivot: Works fine, but you can display the Gallery (that’s silverlight). Use a list view instead.
- So, that covers browser compatibility for larger scale screen dimensions (like a large tablet or desktop).
- For true mobile, you start running into problems. First, you have to do some CSS and Master Page work on SP to get it to respond reactively to screen size differences. Second, most mobile phone screens are too small to take standard Excel Services, PPS, and SSRS dashboard data and scale it down or use it. Therefore, for true mobile, you’ll need to go with a trusted ISV like Mobile Entrée, Infragistics, Extended Results, etc. RoamBI is also very good, but is only iOS focused so it limits you to single device platform.
- In essence, not much for Windows 8 native Metro out of the box for Mobile BI but much promise for the future.
Filed under: Microsoft Conventions Tagged: #SPC12, Sharepoint 2013, Sharepoint Conference 2012
