Today I spent my evening in the Virtual Microsoft Business Applications Summit. Three main pillars were mentioned by Arun and Amir on the journey Microsoft started a while back, towards enabling a data culture across the entire organization! This is a topic that really excites me, and I'm so excited about all of the below improvements to Power BI and the tight integration to the rest of the experiences in the Microsoft Ecosystem, where we need the decisions to be made, by everyone! I therefore have gathered my summary of the news from these three pillars in this post.
Getting from data to decisions and closing the gap in between is hard when there is fragemented systems, tools and disperate data.... BI is fundamentaly about people and culture. The problem includes everyone and every decision based on data. Everyone means it needs to be familiar, unified and that everyone has access. In a safe and governed way across all experiences.
- Amir Netz, MBAS May 6th 2020
#1 The first circle: EVERYONE to fall inlove with data <3
Better onboarding to Power BI desktop: Adding watermarks to add data to your report, drag fields, group together objects and visualization with lasso select to change formatting, add drop shadows etc. Power Point for Data! There are some serious productivity gains right there
Templates (like in Power Point) for data, slicers etc. also a major productivity gain in report authoring
Core Analytics - Small multiples for comparison, multiple views and partitions of the data - A dataviz must
AI infused experiences: Smart Narratives, Anomaly detection. Justina did a fantastic demo on this, make sure to to watch it!
Visual Personalization for end users, this one is another personal favorite of mine, because it enables end-users to do more and IT to do more of what really matters and save costs
Mobile authoring experience
#2 The second circle: How do you scale and govern? An IT problem....
Enterprise Semantic Models with XMLA (read/write) the enhanced metadata format and the introduction of the #1 requested feauture: Composite models. Extend the enterprise models (IT) - Reuse the enterprise semantic models across the organization (analyst). We can combine models, and extend the model with local measures or local datasets. GAME CHANGER! Go have a look at Christian Wade's demos - you will be amazed
Use your favorite tools, Visual Studio, SSMS, SSDT, ALM Toolkit for deployment, tabular editor for translation and calculation groups
Paginated reports with page-view and RLS + subscriptions
Embed with SaaS and PaaS more seamlessly
Deployment pipelines enabling App lifecycle management in Power BI, deploy artifacts in pipelines and compare versions between dev-test-prod environments (workspace). You can set rules on datasets and parameters for each environment. Where one can also do a selective deployments for some artifacts
Dataset Impact Analysis: Downstream, cross workspace and integrated to Desktop with collaboration. End to end view of data flow where you need it!
Bring your own Log Analytics!!
Data Catalog Informatica Integration to allow for Lineage also outside of Power BI... This is very interesting, and it was not mentioned that many details on it.
#3 The third and Last circle - Every decision counts! Bring Power BI and insights to where decisions are made!
Data stack: Azure Synapse Analytics. Deep integration for automatic performance optimization trough materialized views in Synapse
Insight o Action: Direct Query for CDS in Power BI. Build reports without taking down your transactional system and in Near Real Time. Also a game changer!
Visual for Power Automate Flows available within Power BI. The Power Automate flow can even be triggered from a Power BI button as a OOB trigger!
Security: Information protection brought to Power BI, and inherit labels downstream for data artifacts - Will be GA soon, and down the line built into Power BI Desktop
Collaboration: Power BI content integrated into Office, just as with your other documents. SharePoint List integration. One click (Analyze in Power BI) and the report is generated for you. Integration in Teams improved experiences, Power BI will be an application in teams, with collaboration options to share a deep link to keep filters. Excel Power BI datasets natively, and introducing datatypes to understand the entities to provide even more meaningful insights
To summarize; These are the six investment focus areas for 2020:
Here is a blogpost here covering these topics in more depth:
I'm SUPER excited, are you?
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