Power BI Embedded – Part 1

If you’re an organisation thriving to build modern business applications for your clients, you’ll often need to provide rich data visualisations. Nowadays many organisations provide Excel reports sent by email to their colleagues. With the rise of digital transformation in every industry, there is a consistent push for the development of more reporting and analytical content, and when this content is created with a great amount of manual effort, an organisation can often struggle to keep up with the speed of requests.

There are a lot of ways an organisation can upgrade their reporting capabilities. Some of them include using bar chart, controls and further web components from popular Web component libraries in application. And there is a professional way to approach your organisations needs – by embracing a Business Intelligence platform as part of an application.

In this post, I will review one of the greatest options available to an organisation to embed reports into an application, namely Microsoft Power BI Embedded.

The embedded service brings Power BI reports into an application with security configuration enabled for your users.

With Power BI Embedded, Microsoft offers the ability to provide reports and dashboards to a larger group of users. Thanks to the extensive programming interfaces (API) you can completely adapt Power BI to work within your application. And you share the reports with application users, even if they don’t have Power BI accounts.

How do you know whether Microsoft Power BI Embedded is right for your organisation?

Here are some reasons to choose Power BI embedded in your web application –
Power BI Embedded offers you the following advantages:

1. No Power BI end-user licenses

Your clients can continue to sign in to your application just like before, and view and interact with the Power BI reports without requiring any additional licensing or Power BI account. The development team requires a Power BI Pro license for every developer. The organisation providing Power BI Embedded to clients should back up its application workspace by purchasing a dedicated capacity in the Azure Portal. A detailed information for the capacity suitable for your organisation can be found here.

2. The best solution for ISV

With Power BI Embedded, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have the possibility to embed dashboards and reports in their own web applications and offer to their customers a comprehensive analysis platform.

3. Interactive visuals

Another great feature of Power BI Embedded is that visuals from your Power BI reports are interactive – when you click on chart elements, Power BI can filter the data in that chart and other charts in the report based on what was selected, and when you have a hierarchy of data, you can drill down through interactions in the visuals. All these amazing features are still fully compatible in Power BI Embedded!

4. White labelling Design

In Power BI you can design your application the way you want it. Depending on how you do it, the users may not even be aware that you are using Power BI integrated into your application.

5. Data Refresh

To unlock the full potential of Power BI, the data needs to be kept up-to-date. Scheduling dataset refreshes in Power BI Embedded allows you to do this. Data refresh is subject to how you define the refresh policy in Power BI. A scheduled refresh can be defined up to a limit of the clients’ Azure capacity.

6. Data security

You are able to customize security features. Report developers can build large-scale, multi-tenant applications and secure their data based on the user context with Row Level Security.

7. Pay on the go

Power BI Embedded is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution that grows with your application. You can have Power BI embedded instances scale as desired and have usage-based billing without advance payment.

Hope you enjoyed my post and found it useful. If you would like to know how we could help you with your data,  please get in touch.

My next blog post will focus on essential concepts and terminology.

Next time, we will be looking to answer:

1. 1. What are the requirements and setup for Power BI Embedded?
   2. How to register your web application and set up permissions?

We will also explore the web development skills required to embed Power BI content into web pages and applications.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my Power BI Embedded blog post!