We’re excited to announce that you can now embed entire Power BI organizational apps in Microsoft Teams tabs. Until now, this has been one of the top feature requests for Power BI integration with Microsoft Teams. It helps teams and organization put the full Power BI org app experiences directly where people work every day. By adding Org apps in channels and meetings, you enable everyone to access the data they need.
We’ve started to roll out the experience to commercial cloud customers and expect it to be available for everyone in the next week or two.
Let’s look at the new experience and its benefits.
Picking an entire Power BI organizational app to embed in Microsoft Teams
To embed a Power BI organizational app, add a Power BI tab to a channel or meeting.
Go to the Apps pivot in the selection you and notice the new checkbox next to the app name.
When you check the box, you’re choosing to embed the entire organizational app in the Power BI tab. If you don’t see an app in the list, go to the Power BI app in Teams and install an app first or create one from a workspace you own. If you expand the app, you can continue to embed a specific report or scorecard from within an app.
When you pick an app, the app permissions should be set correctly for the team or meeting you’re embedding it into. It’s best to ask the app owner to update the app permissions for you. But don’t worry, end users without permissions can request access from withing the Power BI tab in Microsoft Teams.
Embedding an entire Power BI organizational app
End users of the app will be greeted with the familiar Power BI organizational app user experience.
The app left navigation is shown as it is in the Power BI service. Users can navigate within the app. Reports, Scorecards, Excel workbooks, and even Dashboards (yes Dashboards!) open natively within the embedded view.
Without leaving the channel you can expand the tab and even discuss in the channel or chat with colleagues.
Users need permission to use the app in Power BI, so work with the app owner to ensure everyone has the access they need. End users can request access as well. The new audiences experience for Power BI organizational apps is fully supported in the Teams tab.
If an end user doesn’t have the app installed, it will be installed for them when they open the app in the tab, assuming they have permission to the app.
We tried to keep users in Teams as much as possible when using org apps in the tab. However, some items will open in a browser window because they won’t work when embedded in Teams Desktop or in Teams for the web. For common actions like viewing drill-through reports and dashboard tiles we try open them in place and provide a back experience to navigate back to the original item.
Here are a few of the cases you might encounter that open in a browser window:
- App navigation items that use a link set to open in “content area” or “current tab” open in a new browser window
- Custom links in reports or dashboard tiles open in a new browser window
Why embedding Power BI organizational apps matters in Microsoft Teams
Every organization looks to efficiently deliver data to end users. As team members change, as meeting invites get forwarded to the right folks, or as new content is updated, it’s critical to ensure everyone can quickly access the data they need.
Power BI organizational apps have three important qualities that help teams and groups work effectively together:
- You can share an organizational app with an Office 365 group so that all Team members (and guests if you allow that) can access all the app content. This streamlines permissions management.
- You can bring all the related content into a single navigation that you customize to your team’s needs. You can name items and define audiences to target content to specific users or job roles.
- You can streamline content discovery for more of your end users because the app is branded by an icon and name, so users can more quickly find the data they need. As you add more reports, end users can easily find and discover them because they’re part of the same organizational apps they already use.
As you consider how best to leverage organizational apps in Microsoft Teams, we’d encourage you to give app end users the ability to build new reports connected to the app datasets (grant the build permission). This enables end users to connect to the app data in Excel or create new reports using the same trustworthy app data. These customized and refreshable workbooks and reports speed data culture by helping more of your workforce find and share insights more quickly.
More to come
We’re very excited for this major update to the Power BI in Team experiences. This adds to our announcements about improved chat, feedback, and tab upgrade experiences. Head over ideas.powerbi.com to vote for further improvements we could make. Use the new Give us feedback experience to let us know what you think of our in-Teams experiences.
We’re not done yet with our start-of-year updates for Power BI in Microsoft Teams. Here are a few hints of what’s to come:
- A better way to handle context switches in Teams
- Even more powerful tab configuration options