Using Microsoft Power BI Desktop to build Dynamics CRM Online reports Part 4

This is the fourth part in a series of blog posts about Power BI and Dynamics CRM Online.

• Using Microsoft Power BI Desktop to build Dynamics CRM Online reports – Part 1 – Introduction
• Using Microsoft Power BI Desktop to build Dynamics CRM Online reports – Part 2 – Using option sets in reports
• Using Microsoft Power BI Desktop to build Dynamics CRM Online reports – Part 3 – Relationships and the map control

In this part we will look at how you can publish reports and share and collaborate on your reports and dashboards within Power BI. Before you can publish Power BI artifacts from within Power BI Desktop you need to be signed afterwards you can publish your Power BI artifacts in one click.

If you are working with multiple Power BI/Office 365 tenants don’t forget to sign out and sign in again with the correct credentials (unfortunately I haven’t found a way yet to see with which user identity I’m signed in on Power BI Desktop).

After you have published your report and created a dashboard you can share and collaborate the published information using three different techniques:

• Sharing dashboards and tiles
• Office 365 groups (Power BI Pro License required)
• Organizational content packs (Power BI Pro license required

It is however important to understand that all users will see the same data (except for connections to on-premise Analysis Services datasets where you have the possibility to define security at a more fine grained level). See Power BI Security for more details (TODO tekst toevoegen)
The next figure gives a great overview of the different techniques but I will elaborate the different techniques later on.

Sharing dashboard and tiles
It is important to understand that shared users must belong to the same Office 365 tenant (no external sharing foreseen) and should have signed up for Power BI. Sharing a specific tile is only possible from within the Windows mobile app (see screenshot below). The dashboard owner can allow others to reshare, review shared access and stop sharing with specific users at any time. When a dashboard owner changes a dashboard, the changes become immediately available to all shared users.
For a detailed walkthrough take a look at Share (and unshare) a dashboard from Power BI

Office 365 Groups
Support for Office 365 Groups in Power BI is only available with the Power BI Pro license. The person who creates the group will also become the owner of the group and is able to manage memberships and promote other users as admin. You should only use Office 365 Groups with edit permissions if you trust the different members since they will all be able to create, update and delete the group content.

For more details take a look at Groups in Power BI. It is also important to understand that Office 365 Groups are not something specific to Power BI but that is an essential building block which is part of Office 365 (See Find help about groups in Office 365) and that the concept of Office 365 groups is being leveraged by the Power BI team (although the integration is still rough on the edges – see Power BI’s odd integration with Office 365 Groups). Some features like the ability to using a group’s OneDrive for Business also require you to have both Office 365 and Power BI licenses assigned to the different users.

Organizational content packs
Content packs are made discoverable in the Content gallery and can be made available to the entire organization, members of a security group, members of an Office 365 Group or specific individuals. Unlike sharing where dashboards and reports are read-only, members can unlock and personalize content packs. Updates made to a content pack will apply automatically to non-personalized content and users who have personalized content, will be notified that a new version is available and get the updated pack without losing the personalizations (they will have both versions).

For more details take a look at Organization content packs: an introduction

Tags van Technorati: Power+BI,Microsoft,Visualization,analytics,dynamics+crm,crm+Online,msdyncrm