It’s time again to recap the major features and announcements made by the Power BI service. Here's a rundown of what we'll be covering:
- Usage metrics for dashboards and reports
- PostgreSQL support in the on-premises data gateway
- Power BI SharePoint web part now available for all users
- Data connector SDK
- New services content packs
- Multiple URL filter parameters
- Power BI apps public preview
Announcing Power BI Premium
Last month, we announced Power BI Premium: the next step in our commitment to empower people and organizations with access to critical intelligence. Power BI Premium builds on the existing Power BI portfolio with a capacity-based licensing model that increases flexibility for how users access, share and distribute content. The new offering also delivers additional scalability and performance to the Power BI service. Learn more
Usage Metrics for Dashboards and Reports
We released the availability of usage metrics for dashboards and report authors. This feature gives you one-click access to key usage metrics for your dashboards and reports, allowing you to pinpoint how your end users are interacting with your content. Once known, these metrics will give further leverage to your efforts, allowing you to spend your time on the dashboards and reports that matter most to your end users. Learn more
PostgreSQL support for On-Premises Data Gateway
The latest release of the On-Premises Data Gateway supports the full range of connectivity to PostgreSQL databases. Now users don’t have to go through the ODBC connector when connecting to PostgreSQL!
Power BI SharePoint Web Part Preview Is Now Available for All Users
In February, we announced public preview of the Power BI report web part for SharePoint Online. This allowed users to take the Power BI reports that they published to the Power BI service, and embed them in their SharePoint Online portals. At the time, this functionality was available only to Office 365 First Release customers. However, this month, we are pleased to announce that the Power BI web part is now available to all SharePoint Online users. This means that you’ll be able to embed your Power BI reports in SharePoint Online modern sites pages, regardless of which release option your organization uses.
Data Connector SDK
Power BI uses “data connectors” to connect to our 100+ supported data sources. These are extensions on the connectivity/Mashup engine that powers the “Get Data” experience in Power BI and Excel. As part of the Microsoft Build event, we announced a developer preview of the Data Connector SDK, allowing for the creation of custom data connectors. Learn more
New Service Content Packs
In April, we announced the general availability of the Office 365 adoption content pack, previously in preview. In addition, we released a flurry of new service content packs, allowing users to quickly connect to even more SaaS data sources. The list includes: Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Social Engagement, Dynamics 365 for Financials, TyGraph for Yammer 3.0, Easy Projects, Webtrends for SharePoint and Transit IQ. Learn more
Multiple URL Parameter Filters
In March, we showed you how to filter a report with a URL query string parameter. At the time, we noted that this feature only worked with one filter. We’re excited to announce we now support multiple URL query string parameters. To use this feature, construct your URL as follows:
<reportURL>?filter=<Table>/<Field1> eq 'value' and <Table>/<Field2> eq ‘value2’
For example – following URL will navigate to the report with two filters set: one for the Territory attribute in the “Store” table, and one for the “Month” attribute in the Sales table.
<report URL>?filter=Store/Territory eq 'NC' and Sales/Month eq ’May’
The other limitations mentioned in the original article still apply, but we’re working on lifting those as well. Stay tuned.
Power BI Apps Public Preview
We released Power BI apps to public preview. Apps are built from the ground up for easy deployment of collections of purpose-built dashboards and reports to a large number of business users, empowering them to make data-driven decisions. Your business users can easily install these apps from Microsoft AppSource, and once installed, they can access the content via the web portal or their mobile devices. And, as you make updates, you can push them to your users automatically and control how frequently the data refreshes. Learn more
Resources
- We’ve received feedback that folks want a holistic view of all updates over time in the Power BI service. As a result, we’ve updated our documentation to reflect exactly that.
- For a walkthrough of what we released last month in the service, check out the Power BI March Service Feature Summary.
- Have questions, or feedback? We’d love to hear from you. Be sure to cast your votes on UserVoice to help us prioritize features. Also, feedback and questions are always welcome in the comments below, or on the community forums.