Aziz's SharePoint

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 ref...

When it comes to cloud services, many organizations seem to forget their basic rules and responsibilities surrounding security. Some tend to think because Microsoft hosts Office 365, for example, that Microsoft will handle security for them. Unfortunately, they couldn’t be more wrong. Microsoft will protect your data from those who attempt to gain access to its systems, as well as offer protection from data loss due to an outage or failure of their infrastructure. However, if your credentials were to become compromised, you’re on your own as far as Microsoft is concerned. During the on-premises era, we were much more risk-conscious,  and most companies had robust security policies in place. But now that data has become accessible from all over the world, it is crucial to be aware of the increase in risk and implement additional security measures to cover it. In this article, we will share how you can improve your security within Office 365 without breaking the bank....

We’ve all met them: the users whose idea of a ‘report’ is a large table of data dumped into Excel. However many beautiful data visualisations they see, however many times you try to convince them of the benefits of using Power BI to build reports, they just want to know where the “Export to Excel” button is so they can carry on analysing data in the same old way. Sometimes there’s a valid reason for doing this, sometimes not, but all too often internal politics means that you have to accommodate them. If you’re using Power BI the obvious way to do this is to use the “Export Data” button in Power BI. However, as the documentation notes, there are some limits on the amount of data that can be exported: The maximum number of rows that can be exported from Power BI Desktop and Power BI service to .csv is 30,000 The maximum number of rows that can be exported to .xlsx is 150,000 What’s more, clicking a button to export data and then copying it into an Excel report is a time...

An interesting visualization pattern I have seen is that some customers want to be able to switch the axis on the chart dynamically using a slicer. Let’s take a simple model like this: where I want to be able to dynamically change the axis of my chart to be Currency, Country or Region using a slicer. Today that is not possible out of the box because you cannot have a single slicer crossing different table. Now one option here is to use bookmarks to switch the chart based on a label (but that is cheating )  but I rather fix it in the model. What we need to do is bring all slicer values and their keys into a single table to be used in the slicer, for this use a DAX calculated table like this: Table = var currencyt = CROSSJOIN(ROW("Type","Currency"), VALUES(DimCurrency[CurrencyName])) var country = CROSSJOIN(ROW("Type","Country"), VALUES(DimSalesTerritory[SalesTerritoryCountry])) var region = CROSSJOIN(ROW("Type","Region...

Since Microsoft introduced Power BI in 2015, its usage has grown and its capabilities have continued to evolve. With the introduction of Power BI Premium in early 2017 , enterprises are now able to scale out their Power BI ecosystem while managing costs and using its wide breadth of capability. Power BI is most valuable when a large amount of data is available to process and gain insights from, and Skype for Business (SfB)  generates an endless stream of call quality and telemetry data. This data is readily available in the SfB Quality of Experience (QoE) database, but the ability to analyze it is limited to the capabilities built into SfB. Traditionally this was the Monitoring Server and more recently the Call Quality Dashboard (CQD), both of which generate reports based on this data, however these reports provide a limited number of actionable insights as the data is...

Welcome back to the conclusion of SharePoint 2016 article. If you haven’t’ yet read the Part I of this blog, please check it before proceeding. Let us continue with what is New in SharePoint Server 2016, the migration approach, the overall upgrade process and more today. Here is what we will discuss today. What’s new and what’s been deprecated in SharePoint Server 2016? What has been deprecated in SharePoint 2016? Migration approach to SharePoint 2016 Feature Packs in SharePoint 2016: What’s new in SharePoint Server 2016? Microsoft never fails to excite its customers by releasing many new features in the new release of every product it develops and SharePoint 2016 is no bar for that. The below mentioned image gives a complete overview of all the new features that has been released in SharePoint 2016. Note : When I say new features, they might be newly introduced with this release of SharePoint or might be the enhanced version of a feature/service application in ...

SharePoint 2016 –T he new kid in town. Well, I hope you won’t mind when I say that SharePoint 2016 is the new kid in town considering the fact that it has been more than a year since Microsoft has released SharePoint Server 2016 and it has also announced the release of SharePoint Server 2019 a month back at Ignite Conference.  However, there’s reason for me to still call SharePoint 2016 as the new kid in town because it still remains to be a cutting-edge platform for many SharePoint professionals out there and I’ve seen many organizations actively working on adapting SharePoint Server 2016 as the modern collaboration platform for their IT workspace. So, in this article, I’m going to help you with some good amount of information that should help you in planning the SharePoint Server 2016 Implementation in your organization. Alright, let’s get started …. So, these are the topics I’ll be discussing in detail in this article … Evolution of SharePoint Software & Har...