Microsoft acquired Datazen back in April 2015, and I explored it and wrote about it a couple months later. To date, Microsoft has mostly left the product as is, although a new version containing bug fixes and a few enhancements was released in September.
While I was at PASS Summit I learned that there is a bright future for Datazen as a significant part of the MSBI reporting offerings. Microsoft has provided a reporting roadmap that looks very promising. They are working to align cloud and on-premises solutions and to harmonize report types. In the MSBI reporting world, there will be 4 report types:
- Paginated reports (SSRS)
- Interactive reports (Power BI)
- Mobile reports (Datazen)
- Analytical reports (Excel)
For on-premises solutions, you will have one unified SSRS Report manager that supports mobile reports and interactive reports as well as paginated reports. And it’s much prettier than the old SSRS report manager!
There will also be a unified mobile app so there is no need to switch between apps to get Datazen reports and Power BI reports.
You can get the ebook here for free! We plan on updating it as more information comes out on Datazen and SQL Server 2016.
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