Over the past couple of months, the Microsoft Power BI team has been hard at work making all kinds of changes. Some good and some seemingly bad. For this 3rd blog post, I will do my best to chat about what I love and not really love about Power BI—and of course, brag about Sage Intelligence in between.
So, I’m not really going to spend any time on highlighting any particular features that Power BI has added, as there are countless places on the net that you can get the scoop from. So, in this article, I’m going to rather focus on some of the large scale changes of Power BI as opposed to just the monthly updates.
Microsoft Power BI has introduced a couple of things in recent months. Let’s talk about them.
Power BI Sharing and Collaboration—Yes, I know most of you must have heard about this, and just like us here at Sage Intelligence—you are impacted by this. I couldn’t leave this out. I know I bragged a lot about Power BI being free in my earlier blog posts, and now I somewhat have to swallow and choke on those words. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Power BI desktop is still very powerful and new features are being added monthly, and yes, these features really enhance the product. However, making people pay to share dashboards really got me revved up. Nevertheless, Microsoft did come to the rescue with a 1-year Power BI pro trial, which does cushion, or should I say postpone, the blow. But hey, something is better than nothing, right?
Power BI Data Connector SDK—This is far techier than I would usually get into, but it’s pretty cool—so here we go. Microsoft is encouraging the development of custom data connectors by releasing a Software Development Kit. Though documentation is still in production, I used this myself and it’s awesome. Customers will now be able to connect from Power BI directly to their data sources more easily. This is may not sound like much right now, but the result is that Power BI is really encouraging custom connectors to be built. In my opinion, it’s not ready to be of much use just yet, but it’s super encouraging to see the Power BI team encouraging custom data connectors as they did apps on the windows store in Excel.
Power BI Embedded—At Sage Intelligence, for many years, we have used Excel for our primary report viewer experience. Right now, by far, most of our customers continue to consume reports in Excel. However, a new era is approaching—an era of Power BI embedded. We have teamed up with Microsoft to provide our customers with an amazing interactive reporting experience. For those of you who are new to this aspect of Power BI, Power BI Embedded basically allows you to embed a Power BI report in your website.
What this means is that Sage Intelligence will soon be getting a steroid shot of business intelligence in the form of Power BI Embedded.
And so once again, Sage Intelligence is on the forefront of reporting excellence.
