Can OBIEE 11.1.1.7 source data from a Sharepoint List ?

Question

Hello,

We are trying to see if we can leverage OBIEE to report out of some Sharepoint metrics and would like to know if OBIEE was capable for source data from a Sharepoint List or any other Sharepoint integration point.

I've already reviewed the blogs below, but they only talk about being able to use OBIEE on Sharepoint by embedding it.

http://www.artofbi.com/blog/integrating-sharepoint-with-obiee/

https://sureshotstrategies.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/sharepoint-integration-with-obiee/

Please advise if this is possible or if you have seen prior implementations that source data from a Sharepoint site. Any insight would help.

Thanks in advance.

V

User525984-OC · Answer

@jepva Thank you!! this was my initial insight as well of using web services as the integration point. However I was not sure if capturing GUID and using owssvr.dll was a good solution for an off-premise SharePoint (SaaS) implementation, definitely worth trying though.

I like the idea of exploring automated VBA scripts to pull data from SharePoint lists to excel and use them as datasource in OBIEE as well and since this SharePoint is going to SaaS we would have to deal with additional licensing for access the off premise SQL server.

Thank you very much for your help and I really appreciate your share.

I will update once I have some progress on these idea's.

Thanks,

V

jepva wrote:

Those links are more about integrating an OBIEE object onto a portal or sharepoint rather than retrieving data from SharePoint.

One option may be to use the built-in XML URL from a list on sharepoint, and then use that XML as the XML Gateway data source in OBIEE: https://discoveringsharepoint.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/export-sharepoint-list-data-to-xml-directly-from-the-gui/

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23549_01/bi.1111/e10540/datasource.htm#CHDBCAIJ

And yes, if you're used to retrieving data via REST or SOAP and parsing into XML it could be done in presentation services.  The other way is to use something like Jquery in narrative view and fetch and display data that way.

The easiest way that won't involve coding and messy maintenance is probably setting up a live Excel or Access file that imports the SharePoint list, and then connect via OBIEE as a ODBC data source to the Excel or Access (Access being preferable).

If you have access to a SQL Server, you could use integration services or some of the adapters available to have the sharepoint list imported into a table structure as well.

jepva · Answer