Tuesday 21 November 2017

Power BI online integrate into SharePoint on-prem. extranet Architecture

Power BI Embedded Online Licencing as of 22 Nov 2017:
Basically, there are 2 parts to licencing PowerBI online.
1.> You licence per the number of pages you render per hour.  You need to have the Power BI Embedded licences on infrastructure to serve up a certain number of requests per hour. So work out your peak number of page request per hour and licence for the appropriate plan.  The table below shows the Power BI Embedded plan you'll need to subscribe to:

PlanVirtual CPUsRAM (GB)Max Request per hour
A113300
A225600
A34101200
A48252400
A516504800
A6321009600
Note:  I believe the plan's can be scaled up or down instantly without display and pausing a service stops the Power BI embedded costs.  If you run over the Max requests per hour I believe the Power BI PaaS will still serve up page/reports but you will get an extra bill for the additional reports.

2.> You'll also need to purchase at least 1 Power BI Pro licence, that is used for: administration, content publishing, and development..
3.> As of time of writing (Nov 2017) the Microsoft Power BI Gateway does not offer High Availability (HA), but I'm sure it is coming soon.
4.>  A single account is used to connect to each source and RLS security has to be applied at the source (SQL SSAS), user table mapping is required.



Also see:
http://blog.sharepointsite.co.uk/2017/10/power-bi-on-prem-extranet-information.html
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded-row-level-security


Saturday 18 November 2017

TDD, BDD, DSL...

TDD - Test Driven Development is usual associated with Unit Tests.  

  1. Write tests before creating any application code.
  2. Write code
  3. Run code with tests to verify it works
  4. Repeat to add more functionality to your code

BDD - Behaviour-driven Development is an Agile development process that encourages collaboration between team members.   BDD combines TDD with ideas from domain-driven design (DDD) and object-oriented analysis and design to deliver software.   Get you requirements into User Stories, and develop Acceptance Criteria (I like Gherkin).  This ensure the "The Three Amigos" product owner/business, analysts, testers and programmers are on the same page (note these roles in Agile are often all performed by 1 person).

Domain Specific Language (DSL) - Language used to help communicate a systems behavior or share information such as User Stories and Gherkin,  DSL is very similar to a General Purpose Language such as Use Cases.

Wednesday 1 November 2017

Using a CDN for Custom User Actions

Problem:  I need to inject JavaScript into a couple of hundred thousand site collections and subsites using a Custom User Action.  I want to use a CDN.  Governance will not let me add to the layouts folder on the WFE's.  Using a CDN for a CUA is causing the blank page.

Initial Hypothesis:  I don't want to deploy the same JS file hundreds of thousands of times into the local site collections.  As updating and storage are crazy.  I want a CDN like behaviour, and the closest I can get is to modify the hive directory on each SharePoint on-prem. farm that allows me to reference the JS.  I do have several farms and IT governance won't let me modify the WFE's.

Tobias Lekman has an excellent comprehensive overview of the CUA issue:
https://blog.lekman.com/2013/01/scriptlink-registration-in-sharepoint.html

Doing the usual testing, bizarrely I can use anonymous https://radimaging.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/guestaccess.aspx?docid=55529eccf4555d698555cb26108fb555&authkey=555-6M9555zF555g555 for my CUA JS file.
When I allow external access on my personal public O365 E3 tenant, I can use this URL, the CUA works perfectly.  My client does not have an Office 365 external public tenant I can use, so an Akamai (or another CDN)CDN and fake the validation.  It's either SP URL validated, or I need to load it differently if I want to use a CDN.  I used an Akamai CDN and added /_layouts/15/ into the URL using folders, and the CDN started working for my CUA. e.g. https://cdn.domain.com/sharepoint/_layouts/15/cuatest.js

Possible Resolution:
  1. Local Site Collection uploaded files
  2. CDN assuming the JS location has: