Best way to create BI dashboards outside E10

Epicor ERP 10
1

I am looking for the best way to create BI dashboards that can be viewed in a web browser. I would like to be able to either make the direct SQL connection or schedule some simple scheduled data exports. We recently reimplemened Epicor and people here aren’t used to asking for the data we are now able to provide them. What I have looking into so far:

Microsoft BI: All users would need licenses or I need to publish to the web which would make everything public. I did see one post of someone doing scheduled screenshots that then update a webpage.

SSRS: Created a simple dashboard but unsure how to make that available outside of E10.

Sharepoint: We are moving to Office 365 in early 2017 which will give us Sharepoint but don’t have it currently. From what I have read it would need to be combined with another product to make it work. If it is the best way, I can upgrade myself to O365 right away to start experimenting.

3rd party BI: There are some awesome things going on in self-service BI but for now I just need to push the information in front of those who should be seeing it.

2

PowerBI, if you don’t need DirectQuery then you can use it for free. Limits the refresh/updates of data but if you’re not looking at current days data then it works great.

3

Thanks Jeff. Have you found a way for others to view the dashboards without logging into PowerBI?

4

Are you on SQL Server 2016? SSRS has tremendous new dashboard style delivery features.

5

Thanks Ed. We are not on 16 yet. Will be moving to that as we transition from 10.0.700 to 10.1 early next year.

How is the upgrade process from Sql server 2014? Wondering if it would be worth upgrading 10.0.700?

6

I would heavily encourage 10.1.500+ for the REST feature. Lights up data in a secure way based on user directly from PowerBI or Excel. Should be more examples and docs, features coming in the Insights time frame.