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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/sharepoint-cloud-quicksight.rst

⇱ How to connect Amazon QuickSight to SharePoint Data

How to connect Amazon QuickSight to SharePoint Data

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Create a connection to SharePoint data in CData Connect AI and insert SharePoint data into Amazon QuickSight SPICE to build interactive dashboards.

Amazon QuickSight allows users to build interactive dashboards in the cloud. When paired with CData Connect AI, you get cloud-to-cloud access to SharePoint data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to connect to SharePoint in Connect AI and build dashboards in Amazon QuickSight with access to SharePoint data.

CData Connect AI provides a pure cloud-to-cloud interface for SharePoint, allowing you to allowing build visualizations from SharePoint data in Amazon QuickSight. By importing your SharePoint data into the Amazon QuickSight "Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine" (SPICE), you can leverage the powerful data processing features of the Amazon ecosystem to build responsive dashboards. And with the ability to schedule refreshes of the data stored in SPICE, you control how up-to-date your dashboards are.

About SharePoint Data Integration

Accessing and integrating live data from SharePoint has never been easier with CData. Customers rely on CData connectivity to:

  • Access data from a wide range of SharePoint versions, including Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and above, and SharePoint Online.
  • Access all of SharePoint thanks to support for Hidden and Lookup columns.
  • Recursively scan folders to create a relational model of all SharePoint data.
  • Use SQL stored procedures to upload and download documents and attachments.

Most customers rely on CData solutions to integrate SharePoint data into their database or data warehouse, while others integrate their SharePoint data with preferred data tools, like Power BI, Tableau, or Excel.

For more information on how customers are solving problems with CData's SharePoint solutions, refer to our blog: Drivers in Focus: Collaboration Tools.


Getting Started


Configure SharePoint Connectivity for Amazon QuickSight

Connectivity to SharePoint from Amazon QuickSight is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with SharePoint data from Amazon QuickSight, we start by creating and configuring a SharePoint connection.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
    2. 👁 Adding a Connection
  2. Select "SharePoint" from the Add Connection panel
    3. 👁 Selecting a data source
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to SharePoint.

    Set the URL property to the base SharePoint site or to a sub-site. This allows you to query any lists and other SharePoint entities defined for the site or sub-site.

    The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid SharePoint user credentials when using SharePoint On-Premise.

    If you are connecting to SharePoint Online, set the SharePointEdition to SHAREPOINTONLINE along with the User and Password connection string properties. For more details on connecting to SharePoint Online, see the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation

    👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
  4. Click Save & Test
  5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add SharePoint Connection page and update the User-based permissions. 👁 Updating permissions

Add a Personal Access Token

When connecting to Connect AI through the REST API, the OData API, or the Virtual SQL Server, a Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain granularity of access.

  1. Click on the Gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the settings page.
  2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
  3. Give the PAT a name and click Create. 👁 Creating a new PAT
  4. The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured and a PAT generated, you are ready to connect to SharePoint data from Amazon QuickSight.

Import SharePoint Data into SPICE and Create Interactive Dashboards

The steps below outline creating a new data set based on the connection to SharePoint in Connect AI, importing the dataset into SPICE, and building a simple visualization from the data.

  1. Log into Amazon QuickSight and click "Manage data."
  2. Click "Now data set," select SQL Server as the data source, configure the connection to your Connect AI instance, and click "Create data source." 👁 Connecting to Connect AI as a QuickSight data set.
  3. Select a table to visualize (or subait a custom SQL query for your data). 👁 Selecting a Table to visualize.
  4. Click "Edit/Preview data" to customize the data set.
  5. Select "Import to SPICE for quicker analytics" and click "Visualize." 👁 Importing data to SPICE for quicker analytics.
  6. Select fields to visualize and a visual type. 👁 Visualizing data in QuickSight via Connect AI (Salesforce is shown).

Schedule Refreshes for SPICE Data Sets

QuickSight users can schedule refreshes for data sets that are imported into SPICE, ensuring that data being analyzed is only as old as the most recent refresh.

  1. Navigate to the QuickSight home page.
  2. Click "Manage data."
  3. Select the data set you wish to refresh.
  4. Click "Schedule refresh."
  5. Click Create, configure the refresh settings (time zone, repeat frequency, and starting datetime), and click Create. 👁 Scheduling a refreshing of the data imported into SPICE.

Live Access to SharePoint Data from Cloud Applications

At this point, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to SharePoint data from your Amazon QuickSight dashboard. You can create new visualizations, build interactive dashboards, and more. For more information on gaining live access to data from more than 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources from cloud applications like Amazon QuickSight, refer to our Connect AI page.