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Microsoft Power BI Updates Blog

Power BI Service and Mobile March 2019 Feature Summary

Headshot of article author Nikhil Gaekwad

Senior Product Manager, Power BI
10 April, 2019

It’s time again to recap all the features and announcements we made in the month of March.

Premium Multi-Geo General Availability

Last month, we announced the general availability of Multi-Geo for Power BI Premium. With this feature, you can extend your Power BI tenant to store your users’ data in the geographies covered in the Microsoft Trust Center, except for Power BI Germany, Power BI China operated by 21Vianet or Power BI for US Government. Multi-Geo can also improve the performance of a dataset refresh under certain conditions. The data sources should be cloud-based and datasets should be hosted in workspaces hosted on dedicated capacities located in close proximity to the cloud-based data sources. Try it for yourself by changing the location setting for your Premium capacities. Learn more

Users outside your organization can edit and manage content with Azure AD B2B

We made it much simpler for you to collaborate with individuals outside your organization by announcing edit and manage content capabilities for Azure AD B2B. The feature allows external Guest users to edit and manage content in workspaces, get the full home experience, and partake in many content administration tasks. To enable this for your organization, head on over to the admin portal and look for allow external guest users to edit and manage content in the organization in the tenant settings. Be aware that the external Guest user that you have invited to collaborate must have a Power BI Pro license to manage any content within your tenant. Check out how you can assign them a license and more in the Azure AD B2B with Power BI whitepaper.

March update for the On-premises data gateway

As always, we released an updated version of Power BI On-premises data gateway for the month of March. The latest version has an updated mashup engine and ensures compatibility with the latest March update for Desktop. Check it out by installing the new gateway.

Public preview of XMLA endpoints

We enabled open-platform connectivity to Power BI datasets with the public preview announcement of read-only XMLA endpoints in Power BI Premium. With these capabilities, you can leverage a single one-version-of-the-truth semantic model across a range of data-visualization tools from different vendors, including many of those covered by the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. Learn more about all its use cases by reading the blog post.

Slideshow in presentation mode for Windows Power BI app

In December of last year, we added a new presentation feature in the Windows Power BI app that allows you to present, collaborate, and have productive discussions while using your data in your Power BI dashboards and reports. Last month, we supercharged this feature by adding slideshow, which allows you to rotate between the different pages automatically. It’s a great tool to help you share your favorite Power BI content on public displays that run Windows. Learn more

Updates to the Power BI mobile apps

There were multiple updates that went out in March for the mobile apps in various platforms. Here’s a quick summary:

  • Support for Azure AD B2B Guest users – We brought all the Azure AD B2B goodness to mobile. You can now access all Power BI content shared with you from external organizations on the go. Check out the blog post to walk through a scenario.
  • Supporting Report Server and ADFS configuration (iOS) – We made it easier you users access Power BI reports (PBIX) hosted on Report Server configured with ADFS and WAP on your iOS device.
  • Single tap on reports – You asked, we delivered. We completely changed the way you interact with reports on your mobile app by releasing single tap. With this feature, you only need a single tap to perform actions on visuals, buttons, slicers.

Roadmap updates

We use the Power BI section in the Business Application Release Notes to share details on what’s coming in the next three to six months.  These release notes are updated weekly with details on shipping dates, screenshots, and new announcements. Here’s what we disclosed recently:

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