Your SharePoint AX configuration is starting to look good. It has some serious Excel functionality that is going to make you look like a hero when the business gets their hands on that Excel data. But you want more. You want your AX users to also have access to PowerView and gorgeous dashboards. We’ll do that here. Remember, when integrating business intelligence with SharePoint for Dynamics AX, you must think in terms of web applications. Security, Error handling, and performance are all dependent on how you scale out your web applications.

For Dynamics AX, you may separate PowerPivot and Performance Point from the rest of the install. However, Powerview and SSRS must run on the same web application or AX will start exhibiting unexpected behavior at some point(just trust me on this one from experience).

First, Create a Reporting Services Application

It’s time to get the SSRS installed along with the PowerView application.

And make sure that you run the report under the application pool for the web application which uses the business connector account

And that was easy:

Let’s ensure that SSRS and PowerView are both enabled:

Poweview is installed as part of SSRS, so this part is really easy. Go to the Site Collection Features for the site that you created. Ensure that these Site collection features are enabled:

Reporting Server Integration Feature

Power View Integration Feature

You could easily add PerformancePoint now, but I will leave that for later because I dedicated 16GB of RAM to this image, and it has to host Team Foundation Server also(taking up more ram on my poor AX farm). That being said, I’ve installed PerformancePoint services enough to tell you that there are no special tricks when doing it in AX. You may safely install it within the same web application or use a different one, and the gazillion online tutorials detailing how to install it are spot on. I prefer to use the business connector account but you don’t have to do this, especially where Performance Point is concerned. So, let’s see where we are at. You now have a SharePoint installation setup with a web application and site collection just begging for Dynamics AX Reporting Extensions. Let’s go ahead and install it in Part 4 to complete things.