Following Microsoft’s recent announcement regarding its plans for its upcoming Wave 1 2020 release for April, Microsoft has also included what new & improved features will be coming to its business analytics tools, Power BI. These have been broken down into three different sections: a unified BI platform, big data analytics & self-service analytics.
In our latest blog article, we will discuss these sections in more depth by providing what new & improved features will be coming to each one.
Unified BI Platform
Through the use of Microsoft’s premier business analytics tool, Power BI businesses are able to build global, scalable, secure & unified BI platforms.
This gives customers an opportunity to have one platform that easily outperforms multiple siloed systems, which have a negative impact on open data culture.
More in depth reports based on reliable datasets
When producing reports, organisations should give their employees access to reliable and centralised datasets to allow them to provide a greater accuracy in their reports. The capability to build composite models will empower authors to hook up with Azure Analysis Services data models, or better still Power BI certified data sets (available from April 2020), and expand them with their own custom measures or even integrate them with other imported data. This will make it easier for users to produce more data rich reports, with the use of other data whilst at the same time leveraging controlled datasets.
More comprehensive Data Lineage
You will find that Power BI reports can be wide reaching across different data sources & dependencies. Being able to see this overview of the data lineage in projects is important to be able to:
- Ensure your processes are working correctly
- Understand the potential impact of planned changes within a project
In Microsoft’s latest update, it will be adding a new way of visualising data lineage between the different Power BI artefacts within a workspace, as well as cross-workplace dependencies & much more.
Furthermore, APIs used to withdraw vital information will also be supported. This game changing new capability will make it simpler for users to both monitor and track their data sources in order to make sure that they are in the right condition to be used for regular reporting.
Sensitive Data
As well as the above, the capability for admins to be able to set permissions for exporting files from Power BI will be added as part of the latest update. In addition to providing a better understanding of any potentially sensitive data that is in Power BI, and those users that are regularly accessing it.
Big Data Analytics
If you are finding that your data in your business is getting bigger and becoming more and more complex its crucial to make sure that you select a solution that can handle vast quantities of data & is simple to use and secure. With Microsoft significantly investing in petabyte-scale analytics makes Power BI & Azure a match made in heaven.
Azure Synapse
Through the use of Azure Synapse connections you will find that these automatically build and manage materialised views on larger Power BI models, which take into account their overall usage volume and query pattern.
DirectQuery
As of April 2020, you will find that Power BI dataflows will be able to support DirectQuery capabilities. Furthermore, this new and improved capability will make it easier for designers to make use of dataflows, without the need to import big amounts of data into reports.
Self-Service Analytics
To be able to have an all-inclusive data culture in your business, you need to make sure that all your staff are able to work with data. To help streamline this process, Microsoft is building intuitive user experiences that seamlessly integrate with your Office 365 applications.
Personalised Views
One of the most enthralling new features is the capability for users to be able to personalise their view of the visualisations included in a report. This gives users the ability to tweak the visuals presented to them, even without the access to edit them.
Other Apps
In addition to the above, Microsoft have upped their game in terms of extending Power BI’s usability with other applications. Following this, you will find that you can now directly copy & paste visualisations from a Power BI report straight into other applications such as Microsoft Teams. This visualisations will include all the settings, along with a link to the source of the report, making it easy to share data across your organisation.
Next Steps?
If you are using a Microsoft Dynamics solution and are looking to transform the way that you present data in your business through the use of Power BI then please get in touch with our team of experts today to discuss your specific needs.
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