This is the story of two products – or rather one product that is now a service and another product that is now a component of another product. A few years ago, Microsoft began to formulate a mobile usability story among many fragmented tools. They had a really good reporting product: SSRS, and they had a pretty good self-service BI capability offered as a bunch of Excel add-ins; namely: Power Pivot, Power Query and Power View – but it didn’t do mobile. They bought Datazen which was a decent mobile reporting and dashboard tool, designed primarily for IT developers and semi-tech-savvy business pros to quickly create mobile dashboards using traditional data sources. Datazen wasn’t really a self-service BI tool and wasn’t really designed to work with BI data in the true sense. It was a good power user report tool but was young and needed to be refined and matured as a product. Datazen became “Reporting Services Mobile Reports” and was integrated into the SSRS platform as a separate reporting experience with a separate design tool, optimized exclusively for use on mobile devices using platform-specific mobile phone and tablet apps. Since initial roll-out, product development stalled and has not changed at all since it was released with SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition.
Paul gives us his current advice, as well as a hint at where things could be going.