It’s time again to recap all the features and announcements in Power BI service and mobile in the month of February. Here’s what we released:
- Automatically install apps
- P4 and P5 capacities on Premium
- Organizational custom visuals (Preview)
- February update for On-premises data gateway
- Share reports and improved hyperlinks on Mobile
Automatically install Apps
We’ve now made it easier for you to distribute Power BI apps within your organization by allowing you to push apps to end users. App consumers no longer need to dig through the Microsoft AppSource or follow installation instructions to get their content; pushed apps will automatically be installed in their Apps content list for easy access. This option can be found in the app publishing workflow. Assuming your administrator has granted you rights to push apps, you will see a new option called install the app automatically under the Access tab. When the box is checked, all the users under the permissions section will have the app installed. Learn more
P4 and P5 capacities on Premium
When Power BI Premium was first launched, we provided you with a choice of four different SKUs (EM3, P1, P2, P3), each which contained different numbers of virtual cores and memory sizes. We heard your feedback that this was not enough, and you wanted more. This month, we’ve added two more capacities, P4 and P5, that give you the flexibility of having up to 64 and 128 v-cores, respectively, in your deployment. Yes – you can still allocate capacities to suit your business needs and instantly scale up or down. These capacity sizes are currently available for Power BI customers in the West US and Southeast Australia. Support for additional regions is coming in the future. You can contact your Microsoft account team to learn more.
Organizational custom visuals (Preview)
We released a new way for organizations to develop, share, and maintain custom visuals. Organizational custom visuals, now in preview, allow Power BI administrators to manage and even deploy proprietary custom visuals for report authors to import into their reports on Desktop. Learn more
February update for On-premises gateway
We shipped a new, enhanced version of the on-premises data gateway. New features in this release include: ability to refresh queries combining data from on-premises and cloud data sources, improvements to the gateway support for DirectQuery over SAP HANA (preview), and an updated mashup engine. More details on this release can be found here. Try it out for yourself by installing the new gateway and continue to send us feedback on any new capabilities you’d like to see in the future.
Share reports and improved hyperlinks on Mobile
Lastly, we extended the capability of report sharing to mobile. You can now share reports directly from your mobile app on any platform. At the same time, we also added a new and enhanced tooltip experience where you can drag your finger across the visual to explore details about each data point. Explore away!