I recently attended a Power BI Governance session at Pass 2017 and some new features were demoed in the Service. I thought I would share these with you.
The below have been on the Microsoft roadmap and are not strictly hot off the press. However, we were told to keep an eye on the Power BI blog site (found here) over ‘the next few weeks’ (early December 2017) – which is pretty exciting! Without further ado, here they are:
Workspace Apps
· Selective Report Publishing.
o Meaning you can pick and choose what reports are consumed by the end users.
o This is particularly useful if you have a combination of workspace developers and consume only users. Self-serve analysts may be working on their own reports and they will no longer exposed to everyone within the App.
· Install Apps automatically for existing or new users. This can tie back to Security Groups or Distribution Lists.
Collaborate with External Users
· Directly linked to Workspace Apps.
· Facilitates App and Dashboard sharing with personal work email accounts e.g. Gmail.
· Uses Azure Active Directory business-to-business (AAD B2B) and incorporates Row Level Security (RLS).
o For more on AAD B2B – click here.
– UPN mapping to bridge on-premise AD to AAD and natively support the external email collaboration.
Audit Logs
· Solution templates for faster, convenient Audit Logging. Examples include:
o Author tracking – which users publish the most reports
o Gateway activity – deleted, changed, reconfigured.
o Report Lifecycle – when reports are modified, deleted and history of these activities.
o Dataset and data source tracking.
My personal favourite is the ability to control what reports are packaged into a Workspace App. This has caused me problems at various clients and made the experience of release management more convoluted and time consuming. It will certainly please some of my customers!
Further Reading
I must thank Adam Wilson (Twitter handle below) for delivering a great session at Pass 2017. All images are taken from his slide deck.
· Adam Wilson’s Twitter handle – @AdamDWilson
· Power BI Blog – http://bit.ly/20bcQb4
· AAD B2B – http://bit.ly/2mpKD7H
· Pass 2017 Website – http://bit.ly/2xSbQC0
Contact Me
I would be very interested to see what the community’s thoughts are on these announcements. Feel free to comment or message me on Twitter if you want to discuss anything Power BI.
