Skip to main content

Power BI Announcements In the Dynamics 365 Spring 2018 Release Notes

There have been a lot of important Power Apps and Flow announcements today, as well as the announcement about the Common Data Service for Analytics which is undoubtedly massive news for Power BI users, but buried in the very large “Dynamics 365 Spring ‘18 Release Notes” pdf file (downloadable from https://aka.ms/businessappsreleasenotes) are a number of equally significant revelations about the Power BI roadmap for the next few months. I’ve summarised them here, along with the relevant page numbers; I’ve also highlighted what I think are the most important ones.
  • (P177) Control over linguistic schema – it looks like the phrasing and synonyms functionality for Q&A that was in the old Power BI service has been added back
  • (P178) User experiences for Q&A in reports – report authors will be able to allow report consumers (I assume people who have had reports shared with them via Apps) to use Q&A, as well as to provide suggested questions
  • (P178) Incremental refresh policies – the first sighting of incremental refresh in Power BI! But as the screenshot shows, this is for Premium only (which is not a surprise). It looks like it will be a lot easier to use than managing incremental refresh using partitions in SSAS.
    image
  • (P185) Performance reporting for Power BI Premium – seems to be more detailed metrics for Power BI usage and performance
  • (P186) Data source setup improvements – better UI for configuring datasets and links to gateways
    image
  • (P186) Query acceleration for large datasets – this will allow you to create DirectQuery datasets but then create some in-memory aggregate tables to improve query performance
  • (P186) Power BI metadata translations – translations like we have in SSAS Tabular today, I guess, allowing table and column names to be translated and users to see these translations when they connect
  • (P187) Smart alerts – seemingly an improvement on the existing alert functionality, with some extra AI thrown in?
  • (P187) Slideshow mode – cycle through pages in a report when the report is in full-screen mode
  • (P187) Workspaces with Azure AD Groups – workspaces are being separated from O365 Groups (at last!) and instead permissions can be controlled using Azure AD security groups or Office 365 modern groups
  • (P188) Report Snapshots for Power BI Premium – more subscription options for Premium users
  • (P188) SSRS Reports in Power BI Premium – run SSRS reports inside Premium, with no separate installation of SSRS required. Azure Reporting Services has been resurrected!?
    image
  • (P188) Subscribe other users for email subscriptions – at last!
  • (P189) XMLA connectivity for Power BI Premium – connect to Premium workspaces as if they were Analysis Services instances (which they pretty much are, I guess)
  • (P189 and P209) Common Data Services for Analytics capability in Power BI – Iots more detail on this new service in this section than is available in the post on the Power BI blog linked to above
  • (P192) Power BI Insight apps – pre-built Power BI solutions for services like Dynamics 365 and Salesforce
  • (P194) Details on the roadmap for Power BI Embedded
  • (P204) Details on the roadmap for the Power BI Mobile apps
Not in this document, but mentioned in this blog post today is the fact that the web-based version of Power Query that can be used to load data into the Common Data Service is out of Preview.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SharePoint Framework (SPFx).

What is SharePoint Framework   Client Side SharePoint Development using SharePoint Framework (SPFx). The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) development is a great milestone for SharePoint Client Side development. It is a page and web part model. This provides full support for client-side SharePoint development. It allows to easily integrate component with SharePoint data and supports for open source tooling. With SharePoint Framework, you can use any of your preferred web technologies and tools in your preferred development environment. It is to build responsive and mobile friendly SharePoint products and apps. SharePoint Framework (SPFx)   helps to build custom user interface extensions on top of SharePoint Online in supportive and future prepared way as SharePoint Online keeps itself updated time to time. Create new web part project You need to perform following steps:   1.       Create new project directory at your opted location md helloworld-webpart 2.   
Post a Comment
Read more

Plan SharePoint Migration

Guide to a SharePoint Migration This blog will show how enterprises can approach their SharePoint migration with a few tried and tested action plans. This blog also details how you can successfully define a migration  roadmap, strategy, and goals for a successful SharePoint migration. There are four big transitions you’ll have to consider, before you dive into how to set up a pre-migration strategy. The Different Paths to Modern Management The following explains the four transitions and migrations that can be executed—successful or not. Cloud-first The Cloud-first path is perfect for startups, as there is no need for a migration. Essentially, everything is created in the cloud. Think: Cloud first and only cloud. Big Switch Transition The Big Switch path is often considered the most risky strategy, as organizations can never verify if the transition (also known as “big bang transition”) will end up as a success or a failure. Group by Group Transition
Post a Comment
Read more

3 ways to filter SharePoint lists and libraries

One of the greatest benefits of metadata is the ability to filter on it and get to what you want with just a few clicks. Filtering for information is quite a common exercise these days. Every time we do online shopping, we filter for stuff. When we shop on Amazon® for shoes (something I do every day 🙂 ), we filter on cost, shoe size, reviews, brand among other things. When you go to a bookstore website, you filter for author and genre. When you research your dream car – you filter on car type, fuel economy, color. In SharePoint, we have not one, but three ways to filter SharePoint metadata! Today I would like to describe and explain all the three options to you. Option 1: Column header filter This is the most basic option that has been available ever since custom columns became available in SharePoint. Essentially this is the filtering you do using column headers. The functionality might be well familiar to many users as this is something we can do in Excel as well.
Post a Comment
Read more