Hello everyone, and welcome to Ignite 2021! Our team has been working nonstop since we last met in March, and we’re excited to announce how we’re bringing more innovation to you and your customers.
First, we’re making it easier to collaborate and make better decisions with data. With this goal in mind, we are investing heavily to create a rich experience within your collaboration platform infused with AI to drive insights everywhere. Second, we are delivering a business intelligence platform optimized to meet the unique needs of organizations that strive to make increasingly large, complex volumes of data available for analysis. We continue to innovate on the platform so larger and larger datasets can be handled, while also driving significant investments in trust and compliance
Let’s take a look at what we’ve been up to.
Creating more opportunities for data-driven collaboration
Now Generally Available, the Power BI app for Teams makes data more accessible across your organization. It helps everyone seamlessly include data in chats, meetings, calendar invites and teams channels. By making data more accessible, organizations can easily bring teams together, have insights-based discussions at the point of collaboration, and make better decisions faster. To begin making Power BI available in Teams today, review these available instructions.
To learn about all of the updates and experience enhancements we’ve made check out the detailed blog.
Toyota leverages Teams for enhanced collaboration
One example of how Teams can be used to enhance collaboration across organizations is Toyota North America, a household name in the auto manufacturing industry that used Teams as a collaboration platform to encourage employee productivity and efficiency. Across the company, employees embraced Teams meetings to connect virtually and drive productivity, helping them make fast decisions with the best data—in minutes or hours versus weeks or months. With Power BI in Teams, employees have access to insights at the point of collaboration, driving better decisions – critical in this new era of business.
Making it easier to be result-driven with Power BI goals
In addition to Power BI in Teams, new capabilities with Power BI goals helps organizations work even more effectively towards clear and measurable objectives. Power BI goals enables your organization to drive accountability and track progress toward key outcomes by seamlessly connecting to data in Power BI.
We’ve been rapidly expanding the capabilities of Power BI goals since it entered preview early this year and we’re adding some of the most requested features: A new scorecard visual that can be added to reports, goal level permissions, Power Automate integration, and key experience updates like the ability to move goals within your scorecard and showing or hiding columns.
We are also showing a sneak peek of how you’ll be able to align your scorecard with hierarchies in your datasets so that is simple to share scorecards and goals across large organizations where everyone sees the data granularity that matters to them.
Check out our detailed blog to lean how these new features help you deploy goals even more broadly and integrate them more fully into all of your key business processes.
New platform for your growing data estate
Power BI Premium Generation 2, now Generally Available, is designed for businesses of all sizes to leverage high-end enterprise-grade analytics. With simple, low-overhead administration and optional automatic scaling, Premium customers are better equipped to meet the dynamic needs of compute resources for analytics.
Blazing fast performance with Hybrid tables
Available for Public Preview in an upcoming Power BI Desktop release this year, hybrid tables dynamically combine in-memory caches of historical data with real-time data queried in DirectQuery mode. Data changes in the data warehouse can be reflected in user reports – without the need for a dataset refresh – while providing blazing fast performance over billions of rows of data. When combined with the automatic page refresh feature in Power BI, hybrid tables unlock massive datasets for interactive analysis and provide an unmatched solution for real-time requirements.
Govern your data with Power BI + Azure Purview integration
Now Generally Available, Azure Purview + Power BI allow users to discover and govern all their hybrid data. Capabilities include enumeration of Power BI assets, tracking end-to-end data lineage (such as sub-artifact lineage for datasets), data-source impact analysis, assign glossary terms to Power BI content, find trustworthy data with endorsed artifacts, and ensure your data is protected across your data estate by seeing which data was applied with sensitivity labels across the data journey. Read more about it, in our blog.
Manage sensitive data with Data Loss Prevention policies
Microsoft 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, now in Public Preview, enable security admins to govern upload of sensitive data to Power BI. To meet local and industry specific compliance requirements (e.g., for Financial Services or Healthcare industries), organizations require full visibility over upload of sensitive data to the cloud. With DLP policies, security admins can identify and detect the upload of sensitive data to Power BI Premium workspaces based on Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity label, content scan, and data source. The admin will be able to define triggers of automatic data loss risk remediation actions like alerts and custom policy tips for end users.
To learn more about upcoming DLP policies and Power BI integration with Purview, as well as recent MIP label enhancements, check out the following Microsoft Ignite session: OD166 Drive a data culture for your business on the secure foundation of the Azure cloud and Power BI.
What’s next
With you, our community, and your ongoing engagement and support, Power BI continues to occupy a leading position in the Business Intelligence platform market. Forrester recently positioned Microsoft as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Augmented BI platforms—and we’re not stopping there.
The Power BI team is committed to the mission of helping customers realize a data culture and will continue to find new, innovative ways to make advanced data capabilities available
our users. There’s a full roster of innovations I’ll be sharing with you through our roadmap and upcoming events in the New Year.