Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Summary Post

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For the past 13 weeks on the blog, I have delivered a series of posts concerning Microsoft Exam 70-778, specifically focused towards providing a set of detailed revision notes that cover the broad array of Power BI features assessed as part of the exam. To round things off, today’s blog will bridge together everything I have discussed thus far in the series; with the hope being that this post can be a single reference point for those who have not been following the series to date.

Microsoft Exam 70-778 Overview

The exam, with its full title Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power BI, is targeted towards Business Intelligence (BI) and data professionals who are looking to validate their skills in working with Power BI. The exam is a necessary component, alongside Exam 70-779: Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Microsoft Excel, in attaining the Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) certification in BI Reporting. Successful candidates can then (optionally) pass an additional “elective” exam to gain the Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) certification in Data Management and Analytics.

Skills Measured in the Exam

The skills measured are outlined below, alongside links to the relevant posts from the series and the list of essential points to remember:

Consuming and Transforming Data By Using Power BI Desktop

Connect to data sources.
Skills Measured

May include: Connect to databases, files, folders; import from Excel; connect to SQL Azure, Big Data, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Importing from Data Sources

Key Takeaways
  • Power BI supports a broad range of database systems, flat file, folder, application and custom data sources. While it is impossible to memorise each data source, you should at least broadly familiarise yourself with the different types at our disposal.
  • A crucial decision for many data sources relates to the choice of either Importing a data source in its entirety or in taking advantage of DirectQuery functionality instead (if available). Both routes have their own defined set of benefits and disadvantages. DirectQuery is worth consideration if there is a need to keep data regularly refreshed and you have no requirement to work with multiple data sources as part of your solution.
  • Live Connection is a specific data connectivity option available for SQL Server Analysis Services. It behaves similarly to DirectQuery.
  • It is possible to import an existing Excel BI solution into Power BI with minimal effort, alongside the ability to import standard worksheet data in the same manner as other flat file types.
Perform transformations
Skills Measured

May include: Design and implement basic and advanced transformations; apply business rules; change data format to support visualization

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Performing Data Transformations

Key Takeaways
  • The Power Query M formula language is used to perform transformations to data once loaded into Power BI. Although it is possible to do this via code, Power BI allows us to define all of our required data changes from within the interface, without the need to write a single line of code.
  • Each data source connected to represents itself as a Query within Power BI. There are many options at your disposal when working with Queries, such as renaming, merging, duplication and the ability to disable or reference as part of other Queries.
  • There are wide-range of column transformations that can be applied, which are too numerous to mention. The Transform tab provides the best means of seeing what is available, with options ranging from formatting through to grouping and pivoting/unpivoting.
  • New columns are addable via the Add Column tab. You can choose to base new columns on calculations, conditional logic, other column values or as a defined list of ascending numbers, which may be useful for indexing purposes.
  • It is possible to merge or append queries together to suit your specific requirements. Merging involves the horizontal combination of Queries, whereas appending represents a vertical combination.
  • Parameters can be used to help optimise any complex filtering requirements.
  • Where possible, Power Query will attempt to use the most optimal query for your data source, based on the transformation steps you define. This action is known as Query Folding and, in most cases, SQL-derived data sources will support this option by default.
Cleanse data
Skills Measured

May include: Manage incomplete data; meet data quality requirements

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Cleansing Data

Key Takeaways
  • Data can be filtered directly within Power Query, using Excel-like functionality to assist you in only returning the most relevant data in your queries. The data type of each field plays a particularly important part of this, as only specific filter options will be at your disposal if, for example, you are working with numeric data.
  • From a data quality perspective, you typically will need to handle column values that contain one of two possible value types:
    • Errors: This will usually occur as a result of a calculated column field not working correctly. The best solution will always be to address any issues with your calculated column, such as by using a conditional statement to return a default value.
    • Blanks/NULLs: A common symptom when working with SQL derived data sources, your real problems with blank values start to appear when you attempt to implement DAX custom columns/Measures outside of the Power Query Editor. It is, therefore, recommended that these are dealt with via a Replace action, depending on your fields data types. For example, a number field with blank/NULL values should be replaced with 0.
  • The Remove Rows option(s) can act as a quick way of getting rid of any Error or Blank/NULL rows and can also be utilised further to remove duplicates or a range of rows. In most cases, you will have similar options available to you with Keep Rows instead.
  • There are a variety of formatting options available to us when working with text/string data types. These range from fixing capitalisation issues in data, through to removing whitespace/non-printable character sets and even the ability to prepend/append a new value.

Modeling and Visualizing Data

Create and optimize data models.
Skills Measured

May include: Manage relationships; optimize models for reporting; manually type in data; use Power Query

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Create and Optimise Data Models

Key Takeaways
  • Relationships form the cornerstone of ensuring the long-term viability and scalability of a large data model. Assuming you are working with well-built out, existing data sources, Power BI will automatically detect and create Relationships for you. In situations where more granular control is required, these Relationships can be specified manually if needed. It is worth keeping in mind the following important features of Relationships:
    • They support one-to-one (1:N), one-to-many (1:N) and many-to-one (N:1) cardinality, with many-to-many (N:N) currently in preview.
    • Filter directions can be specified either one way or bi-directionally.
    • Only one relationship can be active on a table at any given time.
  • It is possible to sort columns using more highly tailored custom logic via the Sort By Column feature. The most common requirement for this generally involves the sorting of Month Names in date order but can be extended to cover other scenarios if required. To implement, you should ensure that your data has a numbered column to indicate the preferred sort order.
  • Moving outside of the Power Query Editor presents us with more flexibility when it comes to formatting data to suit particular styling or locale requirements. While the majority of this functionality provides date/time and currency formatting options, for the most part, it is also possible to categorise data based on Location, the type of URL it is or on whether or not it represents a Barcode value; these options can assist Power BI when rendering certain types of visualizations.
  • There may be ad-hoc requirements to add manually defined data into Power BI – for example, a list of values that need linking to a Slicer control. The Enter Data button is the “no-code” route to achieving this and supports the ability to copy & paste data from external sources. For more advanced scenarios, you also have at your disposal a range of M code functionality to create Lists, Records and Tables, which can be extended further as required.
Create calculated columns, calculated tables, and measures
Skills Measured

May include: Create DAX formulas for calculated columns, calculated tables, and measures; Use What If parameters

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Using DAX for Calculated Columns

Key Takeaways
  • DAX is the primary formula language when working with datasets outside of Power Query. It includes, to date, more than 200 different types of functions that can assist in all sorts of data modelling.
  • An important concept to grasp within DAX is context and, specifically, row context (formulas that calculate a result for each row in a dataset) and filter context (formulas that automatically apply any filtering carried out at report level).
  • The sheer amount of DAX functions available makes it impossible to master and remember all of them, particularly when it comes to the exam. Your learning should, therefore, focus on learning the general syntax of DAX and the general types of functions available (aggregation, date/time etc.)
  • There are three principal means of utilising DAX with Power BI:
    • As Measures: These typically present a scalar value of some description, often an aggregation or a result of a complex formula. Using them in association with a Card visualization type is recommended, but this is not a strict requirement.
    • As Calculated Columns: Similar to the options available within Power Query, Calculated Columns provide a dynamic and versatile means of adding new columns onto your datasets. Compared with the options available within Power Query and the complexity of the M language, DAX Calculated Columns might represent a more straightforward means of adding custom columns onto your datasets.
    • As Calculated Tables: A powerful feature, mainly when used in conjunction with Calculated Columns, you have the ability here to create entirely new datasets within the model. These will typically derive from any existing datasets you have brought in from Power Query, but you also have functionality here to create Date tables, sequence numbers and manually defined datasets as well.
  • What-if Parameters provide of means of testing DAX formulas, as well as allowing report users to perform predictive adjustments that can affect multiple visualizations on a report.
Measure performance by using KPIs, gauges and cards.
Skills Measured

May include: calculate the actual; calculate the target; calculate actual to target; configure values for gauges; use the format settings to manually set values

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Utilising KPIs with Gauge Visualisations

Key Takeaways
  • There are two principle visualization types available within Power BI to help track actual-to-target progress – KPIs and Gauges.
  • KPIs provide a more visually unique means of a binary success/fail determination when tracking towards a target. It is also possible to use KPI’s to track variance over time via the Trend axis. The Indicator will typically be the result of some form of aggregation or Measure.
  • Gauges provide a less visually distinctive, but non-binary, mechanism of viewing progress towards a target. Gauges support more potential field well values when compared with KPIs, nearly all of which are optional in some way. You can also manually define some of these values, for situations where your data model does not contain the required information.
  • All visualizations within Power BI are modifiable from a display or formatting perspective. The same basic options will generally be supported – such as changing a font type or background colour – with more specific configuration properties available per unique visualization type. For example, a KPI visualization can be customised to hide the background Trend Axis entirely. All of these options are designed to give developers greater control over the look and feel of their reports and to mirror them as closely as possible to any potential branding requirement.
  • When building out a solution designed to monitor progress within Power BI, the steps involved will typically be more in-depth than merely creating a new visualization. In most cases, there will be a requirement to bring together a lot of the other skills that have been discussed previously within this series – such as creating DAX formulas, modifying data within Power Query or bringing together different data sources into a single model. It is essential, therefore, not to underestimate the amount of time and effort involved in creating a practical solution that takes advantage of KPIs or Gauges.
Create hierarchies
Skills Measured

May include: Create date hierarchies; create hierarchies based on business needs; add columns to tables to support desired hierarchy

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Creating Hierarchies

Key Takeaways
  • Hierarchies within Power BI provide a means of logically categorising data into an order of preference or precedence, providing greater flexibility to Power BI report users when they interact with visualizations.
  • Date Hierarchies are created and managed automatically by Power BI for each Date or Date/Time field defined within your model. These automatically create fields that contain the Year, Quarter, Month & Day values from the respective date fields. These fields can then be utilised as part of a Table visualization or within a DAX formula. Date Hierarchies can also be completely disabled if required.
  • Custom (or User-Defined) Hierarchies need to be created manually and provide additional customisation options when compared to Date Hierarchies, such as the number of fields they contain, the order and its name. A Custom Hierarchy will typically make use of one of several Parent/Child DAX functions, such as PATH or PATHITEM.
  • Including a hierarchy as part of a chart visualization, such as a Pie chart or Donut chart, opens up other drill-down capabilities around your data. Indicated by the additional arrow icons included at the top of the visualization, they provide the means for users to interrogate data points that interest them the most straightforwardly.
Create and format interactive visualizations.
Skills Measured

May include: Select a visualization type; configure page layout and formatting; configure interactions between visual; configure duplicate pages; handle categories that have no data; configure default summarization and data category of columns; position, align, and sort visuals; enable and integrate R visuals; format measures; Use bookmarks and themes for reports

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Create and Format Interactive Visualizations

Key Takeaways
  • Power BI delivers, out of the box, a range of different visualizations that cater towards most (if not all) reporting requirements. Should you find yourself in need of additional visualizations, then Microsoft AppSource is your go-to destination for finding visualizations developed by others. If you have experience working with either Node.js or R, then these can be used to build bespoke visualizations also.
  • When first developing a report, you should be able to match a requirement for a specific visualization type, to ensure that you are delivering a solution that is both meaningful and useful. From an exam perspective, this becomes a more critical consideration, and you should be prepared to suggest the most optimal visualization to use when given a specific scenario.
  • After adding visualization’s to your report, you have additional options available to customise them further. For example, you can specify a preferred sorting order for your data, override any summarizations used and move/align your visual on the report page.
  • By default, visualizations in Power BI are designed to change automatically, based on how users interact with the report. All of these options are controllable via the Edit interactions button, allowing you to specify your preferred cross-filtering and cross-highlighting conditions.
  • There is a range of report page customisation options available to developers. It is possible to resize a page to any possible height/width, allowing you to optimise your report for specific devices. Also, you can modify the colour of a page (or its wallpaper) or add an image instead. Pages can also be renamed, reordered or duplicated.
  • Measures can be formatted in the same way as calculated columns, meaning you can specify a data type or, for numerics, modify the number of decimal places.
  • Bookmarks allow developers to set up “checkpoints” within a report, based on how a report page has been filtered. These can then be used to automatically navigate the user through a report, applying these filtering steps automatically. This feature can help transform your report into an interactive story.
  • Visualizations will automatically inherit their various colour properties from the currently selected report theme. Although these can be modified granularly, the fastest and most consistent way of making these changes en masse is to change the Theme. Power BI includes some Themes out of the box, but you also have the option of building your own using a custom JSON file; this can then be imported into different reports, providing a portable means of enforcing a particular branding requirement.
Manage custom reporting solutions
Skills Measured
  • May include: Configure and access Microsoft Power BI Embedded; enable developers to create and edit reports through custom applications; enable developers to embed reports in applications; use the Power BI API to push data into a Power BI dataset; enable developers to create custom visuals
Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Managing Custom Reporting Solutions

Key Takeaways
  • Power BI Embedded is an Azure hosted offering that allows you add Power BI Report content into bespoke applications. This deployment option can be incredibly useful if you wish to make available your Power BI solution to users outside of your organisation or if you have an existing, bespoke application system that can benefit from utilising Power BI content. An Azure subscription is required to begin working with Power BI Embedded and you are billed based on node size, not individual user licenses. All Power BI content requires publishing to the online service before its contents become available for Power BI Embedded to access. Report developers will, therefore, need granting a Power BI Professional license to carry out these activities.
  • The Power BI API grants access to developers to perform automation or administrative actions programmatically against the Power BI Online service. Utilising a REST API, developers can determine the optimal programming language of choice to interact with the API, allowing them to streamline the deployment of Reports or Dashboards to the Power BI service or leverage additional functionality when utilising Power BI Embedded. The API can also cater to specific data load requirements, although more complex needs in this area would require addressing via alternate means (SSIS, Azure Data Factory etc.)
  • Developers can add their own bespoke visualizations to a Power BI Report by either developing them using Node.js or using the R language. The first of these options facilitate a more streamlined deployment mechanism and allows developers to add their visualizations to AppSource, whereas the second option may be more useful for complex visualization types with an analytical or statistical function.

Configure Dashboards, Reports and Apps in the Power BI Service

Access on-premises data
Skills Measured

May include: Connect to a data source by using a data gateway;publish reports to the Power BI service from Power BI Desktop; edit Power BI Service reports by using Power BI desktop

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Report Publishing, On-Premise Gateway & Creating Dashboards

Key Takeaways
  • The Power BI On-Premise Gateway provides a streamlined route to working with non-cloud data sources within Power BI, Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. As a lightweight and easy-to-configure client application, it supports a wide variety of data sources, making them accessible as if they were in the cloud. Once set up, corresponding Data Sources are then made available for configuration and for leveraging as part of any Power BI Dataset.
  • Reports can be published into Power BI Online, meaning that they become accessible online and to a broader group of users, without requiring access to Power BI Desktop. Reports need deploying into a Workspace, which can be created manually or derived from an Office 365 Group. Each Report contains a corresponding Dataset, where all queries defined within Power BI Desktop exist.
  • Reports that already exist on Power BI Online can be updated by just publishing a new version of the Report from Power BI Desktop. It is also possible to modify Reports from directly within the browser and by downloading a copy of the .pbix Report file as well, which can then be altered and re-published.
Configure a dashboard
Skills Measured

May include: Add text and images; filter dashboards; dashboard settings; customize the URL and title; enable natural language queries

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Report Publishing, On-Premise Gateway & Creating Dashboards

Key Takeaways
  • Dashboards provide a means of grouping together various content as tiles, designed for at-a-glance analysis and optimal end-user experience.
  • The list of content that can be pinned to a Dashboard includes:
    • Visualizations
    • Web content
    • Images
    • Text boxes
    • Videos
    • Custom streaming data
  • Pinned content can be re-arranged on Dashboard via drag and drop functionality. It is also possible to resize tiles to any given height/width.
  • Within the settings of a Dashboard, it is possible to enable/disable features such as natural language queries (Q&A’s) and Notes.
  • Some features of a Dashboard are only available if you have a Power BI Professional subscription, such as sharing and email subscriptions.

 

Publish and embed reports
Skills Measured

May include: Publish to web; publish to Microsoft SharePoint; publish reports to a Power BI Report Server

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Publish and Embed Reports

Key Takeaways
  • The Publish to web option allows for non-licensed, external users to view a Power BI Report in its entirety. A URL and IFrame embed code can be generated for this at any time within the portal and then dropped into virtually any website. Although you will lose some functionality when deploying a Report out in this manner, you can expect that users will be able to perform most types of interactions with visualizations, Report pages and other components, as if they were accessing the Report through Power BI Online. In some cases, you may be unable to use the Publish to web option if your Report uses certain kinds of features, such as R Visuals or row-level security. You must also take into account any privacy or data protection concerns, as Reports deployed out in this manner will be publically accessible; where this is an issue, the Embed option is available as a secure alternative.
  • There are three steps involved if you wish to add a Report to SharePoint. First, you must generate the unique SharePoint embed URL within Power BI. Secondly, you then need to add on the dedicated control for this feature on your target SharePoint page and configure the relevant display options. Finally, you then need to ensure that all SharePoint users have been granted access to the Report, either at a Workspace level (recommended option) or by having the Report shared with them. By implication, in this scenario, all SharePoint users would have to have at least a Power BI Professional license to take full advantage of this functionality.
  • Publishing a Report to Power BI Report Server is mostly the same as if you were to do the same with the online version of the product. Instead of selecting a Workspace to add the Report to you, specify the name of the Report Server folder where the Report will reside. From a development standpoint, the dedicated Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server must be used and may differ in functionality from the “normal” version of the tool. There is also no option to edit a report from within Power BI Report Server like you can through the online version.
Configure security for dashboards, reports and apps.
Skills Measured

May include: Create a security group by using the Admin Portal; configure access to dashboards and app workspaces; configure the export and sharing setting of the tenant; configure Row-Level Security

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Securing Power BI Dashboards, Reports and Apps

Key Takeaways
  • Workspaces act as a container for the various components that form a Power BI Reporting solution. Within a Workspace, you will find all of the Dashboards, Reports, Workbooks and Datasets that developers have published content to. Each User has a Workspace created for them in Power BI when they first access the service. Additional Workspaces can be added through Office 365 Groups or by installing a Power BI App from AppSource. Dashboards and Reports created within your a Users Workspace are shareable to other Users, provided that your account has a Power BI Professional license assigned to it.
  • To help manage permissions to Dashboards/Reports in a more efficient manner, Administrators can create Security Groups on the same Office 365 Tenant where Power BI Online resides. These can contain multiple groups of Users, allowing administrators to minimise the amount of effort involved in managing Dashboard/Report access. Most crucially, this will also enable Users that do not have an Exchange Online mailbox to access Dashboards/Reports when they are shared out in this manner.
  • Administrators have a whole host of options available to them within the Tenant settings area of the Admin Portal. These include, but are not limited to:
    • Export and Sharing Settings
    • Enable/Disable Content Sharing
    • Enable/Disable Publish To Web
    • Enable/Disable Export Reports as PowerPoint Presentations
    • Enable/Disable Print Dashboards and Reports
    • Content Pack and App Settings
    • Integration Settings
    • Custom Visuals Settings
    • R Visuals Settings
    • Audit and Usage Settings
    • Dashboard Settings
    • Developer Settings
  • All of these settings can be enabled for a specific security group, the entire organisation (excepting specific security groups) or allowed for particular security groups, excluding all others in the organisation.
  • Row-Level Security (RLS) allows report developers to restrict data, based on Roles. Row-level DAX evaluation formulas are used to achieve this, which filters the data that is returned, depending on a TRUE/FALSE logic test. To utilise the feature, you must define both the Roles and DAX formulas for each query within your data model. Then, after deploying your Report to Power BI Online, you then assign Users or Security Groups to the Role(s) created within Power BI Desktop. It is possible to view the effect of a Role at any time, within Power BI Desktop or Online, via the View As Role functionality. With the wide-array of DAX formulas available, including specific ones that return the details for the current user accessing a Report, it is possible to define very granular filtering within a Power BI report, to suit particular security or access models.
Configure apps and apps workspaces.
Skills Measured

May include: Create and configure an app workspace; publish an app; update a published app; package dashboards and reports as apps

Revision Notes

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Working with Apps and App Workspaces

Key Takeaways
  • Workspaces act as a container for the various components that form a Power BI Reporting solution. Within a Workspace, you will find all of the Dashboards, Reports, Workbooks and Datasets that developers have published content to. Each User has a Workspace created for them in Power BI when they first access the service. It is also possible to create additional Workspaces, either through the Power BI Online interface or by creating an Office 365 Group. A new experience for creating Workspaces is currently in preview which, once released, would negate the need for each Workspace to have an associated Office 365 Group.
  • When creating a Workspace, you can define various settings such as the type of access each user has (read-only or ability to modify its content), its members and whether it requires assignment to a Power BI Premium node. It is not possible to change the access type for a Workspace after creation, but you can freely change its name or modify its membership at any time.
  • The contents of a Workspace can be published as an App, enabling you to expose your solution to a broader audience within or outside your organisation. Once published, users navigate to the Power BI AppSource store for their tenant, which lists all Apps available for installation. Once installed, they will then become visible from within the Apps area of the application. You can update content within an App at any time by republishing its corresponding Workspace. It is also possible to define individual properties within an App, such as its description, access rights and landing page. To install and use Apps, the user in question must have a Power BI Professional license.

Additional Preperation Resources

The official Microsoft exam reference book is a helpful learning aid for this exam, particularly given that it includes numerous exercises that you can work through to familiarise yourself with different Power BI functionality. There is also an online course available on the edX website which, despite not covering the whole exam syllabus, does provide a useful visual aid and includes a lot of the features you are expected to know for the exam. Finally, nothing beats actually working with the product itself and trying out the various features yourself. Power BI Desktop is a free download and, with access to one of the sample databases provided by Microsoft, you can very quickly provision an environment on your own home computer to enable you to experience everything that Power BI has to offer.

Exams are always a nightmarish experience, both when preparing for them and when you are sat there in the test centre. I hope that this post, and this whole series, proves to be useful in helping with your exam preparation and getting you ready to pass the exam with flying colours 🙂

Exam 70-778 Revision Notes: Publish and Embed Reports

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Welcome to the eleventh post in my blog series concerning Microsoft Exam 70-778, where I hope to provide a revision tool for those planning to take the exam or a learning aid for those looking to increase their Power BI knowledge. In last week’s post, we covered a broad spectrum of topics ranging from Dashboards through to integrating on-premise data sources within Power BI Online. Dashboards are just one means of consuming published Power BI Reports, with a few additional options also available to help us include Power BI content within existing websites, intranet or on-premise deployments. The Publish and embed reports exam topic covers this, focusing on the following skill areas:

Publish to web; publish to Microsoft SharePoint; publish reports to a Power BI Report Server

Let’s dive into each of these specific areas of functionality and how to utilise them most effectively.

Publish to Web

The ability to publish Power BI content to any location on the web can be incredibly beneficial. Users can access Power BI information without needing to log into Power BI Online or even, necessarily, be licensed, allowing you to quickly include Reports as part of an existing website, blog or application. Although there is some trade-off from a functionality perspective, you can expect to do most of the things you’d expect a Power BI Report to do as standard. Keep in mind though; it’s only possible to publish Reports to the web, not Dashboards or Datasets. To do this, you navigate to the relevant Report within Power BI Online and select the File -> Publish to web option:

At this stage, note that you will be presented with additional dialog box prompts, indicated below, which emphasise two critical points to remember regarding the Publish to web option:

  • ANYONE on the web can access your Report once published, and there is also a high likelihood that crawler bots, including search engines, will also index and include your Report as part of search results. To ensure that only users within your organisation can access your report, consider using the Embed option as opposed to Publish to Web, which is available for users assigned a Power BI Professional license.
  • If you wish to embed reports for internal users to access, then this is technically not allowed under the Power BI Free license. To use this functionality in a compliant manner, you must ensure that all internal users accessing the report are assigned a Power BI Professional license.

Once sorting the various T&C’s, a URL and embed code is generated for you to use. A handy feature for less-technical users is the ability to modify the size of the IFrame, based on the options defined below:

You can then embed the IFrame snippet within any HTML page. For example, the below snippet would load a basic HTML document, with the Report fully rendered for access:

<html>
<p><b>iFrame Test</b><p>
<iframe width="933" height="700" src="https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=aBjFVit61EihycCDLLtDAlMJeVQICkMIwvEFSbgosnAFFjy4kctLkRzqVxB3xZHfsNMO4GDDbzxGSbLfycHKUSEytFTe16sULAe61SsXzPdA2hhGWiTx7YTwf4o6" frameborder="0" allowFullScreen="true"></iframe>
</html>

The rendered Report behaves as you would expect any other Power BI Report to work. You can navigate between pages, move your cursor over visualizations, drill up/down through them, view their tooltips and even apply filters. However, you are unable to see or export any underlying data or export the Report as a PowerPoint document/PDF. You also cannot Publish to web a report that:

  • Has R visuals.
  • Uses Row-level security.
  • Has an on-premise SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular data source.
  • Is shared with you.

Putting aside the paramount data privacy and licensing concerns associated with this feature, it does nevertheless present a nice way of sharing out Power BI content for external users to access.

Publish to SharePoint

Intranet sites represent a potential deployment option for Power BI content, and the Publish to SharePoint Online option helps to accommodate this. Available for Power BI Professional subscriptions and online SharePoint deployments, this feature works similar to Publish to web and can be found nestled just next to this option on the File tab:

Once selected, Power BI will then generate a URL link, as indicated below:

Your next step will then be to navigate to the SharePoint page that you wish to embed the Report onto and adding the appropriate control onto the page:

And then populate the proper details on the right-hand pane when it appears:

Note that you have a few options here to help customise how the Report renders. You can specify a default page, the page ratio and also toggle whether the Navigation or Filter panes are displayed.

An important thing to remember when working with this feature is to ensure that all SharePoint users who need to access the Report have been granted the relevant access permissions within Power BI; merely adding the Report into SharePoint will not automatically do this for you, and users will instead get an error message. The quickest way to grant these privileges is to ensure that all users are part of the Workspace/Office 365 Group where the Report resides. Alternatively, you can also specifically Share the Report out to all required users, but this could prove cumbersome to manage for larger deployments.

Publish to Power BI Report Server

Organisations that are not quite ready to start using Power BI within the cloud-based offering can still potentially benefit from all the goodness that the solution has to offer. If you have an active SQL Server Enterprise license agreement with Software Assurance or a Power BI Premium subscription, then Microsoft allows you to download a fully licensed copy of Power BI Report Server. This application is, in effect, an on-premise version of Power BI Online, provideing sufficient feature parity alongside some nice little extras thrown in. From a technical standpoint, the solution is a retooled version of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS); and, as a consequence, you have the full capability to deploy out SSRS reports onto Power BI Report Server. Functionality like this may represent a significant boon, allowing organisations to leverage their existing reporting solutions while enabling them to start developing new reports using Power BI as well. Microsoft also provides a Developer edition of the application, which is really neat. 🙂

Publishing a Report to Power BI Report Server has some significant differences when compared to the Online version. Because the solution does not benefit from the same release cadence as the online offering, you must use a separate Power BI Desktop application when developing for Power BI Report Server. The latest release from January 2019 (at the time of writing this) is available for download, but will not necessarily have the same monthly release cycles compared with the “normal” Power BI Desktop application. As such, be aware that you may encounter issues working with Reports developed between both Desktop applications and, the general recommendation would be to ensure these are developed separately wherever possible.

When getting a Report deployed out to Power BI Report Server, you must somewhat counter-intuitively navigate into the File -> Save as area of the application, where the appropriate option becomes visible:

Then, when prompted, populate the URL field with the Web Portal URL value (derived from the Report Server Configuration Manager application):

Next, specify the name of the folder where the Report will be saved. In the example below, there are no folders set up, so the Report will be deployed out to the default, root folder on the instance:

It may then take some time for the Report to publish out successfully…

…at which point, you can then take a look at how the Report looks within the application. As the screenshot below indicates, the experience here is virtually identical when compared to Power BI Online:

If you ever need to make changes to your Report, you would have to revert to Power BI Desktop, make the appropriate changes and then repeat the steps above. Unlike Power BI Online, there is no option to modify reports from within a web browser. A small trade-off but, as we can see, Power BI Report Server does provide a complete Power BI experience that is tailorable to an organisation’s specific infrastructure/hosting requirements.

Key Takeaways

  • The Publish to web option allows for non-licensed, external users to view a Power BI Report in its entirety. A URL and IFrame embed code can be generated for this at any time within the portal and then dropped into virtually any website. Although you will lose some functionality when deploying a Report out in this manner, you can expect that users will be able to perform most types of interactions with visualizations, Report pages and other components, as if they were accessing the Report through Power BI Online. In some cases, you may be unable to use the Publish to web option if your Report uses certain kinds of features, such as R Visuals or row-level security. You must also take into account any privacy or data protection concerns, as Reports deployed out in this manner will be publically accessible; where this is an issue, the Embed option is available as a secure alternative.
  • There are three steps involved if you wish to add a Report to SharePoint. First, you must generate the unique SharePoint embed URL within Power BI. Secondly, you then need to add on the dedicated control for this feature on your target SharePoint page and configure the relevant display options. Finally, you then need to ensure that all SharePoint users have been granted access to the Report, either at a Workspace level (recommended option) or by having the Report shared with them. By implication, in this scenario, all SharePoint users would have to have at least a Power BI Professional license to take full advantage of this functionality.
  • Publishing a Report to Power BI Report Server is mostly the same as if you were to do the same with the online version of the product. Instead of selecting a Workspace to add the Report to you, specify the name of the Report Server folder where the Report will reside. From a development standpoint, the dedicated Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server must be used and may differ in functionality from the “normal” version of the tool. There is also no option to edit a report from within Power BI Report Server like you can through the online version.

We saw previously how Power BI Embedded presents a means of integrating Power BI visualizations as part of a bespoke application, but the options offered in this post today do represent a potentially quicker and simpler alternative to achieving the same ends. In this series penultimate post next week, we will dive deeper into the various security options available as part of Power BI, to help ensure that both reports – and any underlying data – can be “hardened” to suit a variety of different scenarios.

My Highlights from the October 2018 Business Application Release Notes

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With two major Microsoft events recently taking place back to back over the last fortnight – Microsoft Inspire & the Business Applications Summit – there is, understandably, a plethora of major new announcements that concern those of us who are working in the Business Applications space today. The critical announcement from my perspective is the October 2018 Business Application Release Notes, which gives us all a nice and early look at what is going to be released soon for Dynamics 365, Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, Power BI and other related services. Unlike previous Spring or Fall releases, the sheer breadth of different features that now sit within the Business Applications space makes it all the more important to consider any new announcement carefully and to ensure that they are adequately factored into any architectural decisions in months ahead. If you are having trouble wading through all 239 pages of the document, then I have been through the notes and picked out what I feel are most relevant highlights from a Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365CE) perspective and their potential impact or applicability to business scenarios.

SharePoint Integration with Portals

This is a biggie and a feature that no doubt many portal administrators have been clamouring for, with the only other option being a complicated SDK solution or a third-party vendor approach. Document management directly within CRM/D365CE has always been a sketchy idea at best when you consider the database size limitations of the application and the cost for additional database storage. That’s why SharePoint has always represented the optimal choice for storing any documents related to a record, facilitating a much more inexpensive route and affording opportunities to take advantage of the vast array of SharePoint features. When you start adding portals into the mix – for example, to enable customers to upload documents relating to a loan application – the whole thing currently falls flat on its face, as documents (to the best of my knowledge) can only be uploaded and stored directly within CRM/D365CE. With the removal of this feature, a significant adoption barrier for CRM Portals will be eliminated, and I am pleased to also see an obligatory Power BI reference included as part of this announcement 🙂

In addition, we are providing the ability to embed Power BI charts within a portal, allowing users to benefit from the interactive visualizations of Power BI.

Portal Configuration Migration

Another process that can regularly feel disjointed and laborious are the steps involved in deploying Portal changes from Dev -> UAT/Test -> Production environments, with no straightforward means of packaging up changes via a Solution or similar for easy transportation. This torment promises to change as part of the release in October, thanks to the following:

To reduce the time and effort required to manage portal configuration across environments, we are publishing schema for configuration migration that works with the Configuration Migration SDK tool.

If you are not aware of the Configuration Migration tool, then you owe it to yourself to find out more about what it can accomplish, as I am sure it will take a lot of headache out of everyday business settings, product catalogue or other non-solution customisation activity that you may be carrying out in multiple environments. The neat thing about this particular announcement is that an existing, well-established tool can be used to achieve these new requirements, as opposed to an entirely new, unfamiliar mechanism. Integration with the current Configuration Migration tool will surely help in adopting this solution more quickly and enable deployment profiles to be put together that contain nearly all required configuration data for migration.

Portal Access Restrictions

In Portal terms, this is a relatively minor one, but a welcome addition nonetheless. When testing and developing any software application, it is always prudent to restrict access to only the users or organisations who require access to it. This option has not been available to Portals to date, but no longer thanks to the following announcement:

This feature would allow administrators to define a list of IP addresses that are allowed to access your portal. The allow list can include individual IP addresses or a range of IP addresses defined by a subnet mask. When a request to the portal is generated from any user, their IP address is evaluated against the allow list. If the IP address is not in the list, the portal replies with an HTTP 403 status code

The capabilities exposed here demonstrate a lot of parity with Azure Web Apps, which is, I understand, what is used to host portals. I would hope that we can see the exposure of more Azure Web App configuration features for portal administrators in the years ahead.

Multi-resource Scheduling

There has been a real drive in getting the Resource Scheduling experience within D365CE looking as visually optimal and feature-rich as possible in recent years. There is a specific reason to explain this – the introduction of Project Service Automation and Field Service capability requires this as an almost mandatory pre-requisite. There is a wide array of new features relating to resource scheduling as part of this update, but the announcement that caught my eye, in particular, was the ability to group related resources on the Resource Scheduler, as predefined “crews”. This new feature is hugely welcome for many reasons:

  • Different types of jobs/work may require resources with a specific set of skills in combination to complete.
  • It may be prudent to group specific resources if, for example, previous experience tells you that they work well together.
  • Location may be a factor as part of all this, meaning that by scheduling a “crew” of resources together within the same locale, you can reduce the unnecessary effort involved in travelling and ensure your resources are utilising their time more effectively.

The release notes give us a teaser of how this will look in practice, and I am eager to see how this works in practice:

Leave and absence management in Dynamics 365 Talent

I have been watching with casual, distant interest how the Dynamics 365 Talent product has been developing since its release, billed as one of the first applications built on top of the new Unified Interface/Common Data Service experience. I have noted its primary utility to date has been more towards the Human Resources hiring and onboarding process, with a significant feature gap that other HR systems on the market today would more than happily fill, by providing central hubs for policy documents, managing personal information and leave requests. I think there may be a recognition of this fact within Microsoft, which explains the range of new features contained within Dynamics 365 Talent as part of the October 2018 release. The new feature that best epitomises the applications maturity is the ability to manage leaves and absences, noted as follows:

Organizations can configure rules and policies related to their leave and absence plans. They can choose how employees accrue their time off, whether it’s by years of service or by hours worked. They also can configure when this time off can be taken and if certain types of time off must be taken before others. If they allow employees to get a pay-out of their time off, this can be configured as well.

Managers can see an all-up calendar view of their team members’ time off as well as company holidays and closures. This view shows them where they may have overlap as well as time-off trends for their team and enables them to drill down to gain a better understanding of an individual’s time off.

This immediately places the system as a possible challenger to other HR systems and represents a natural, and much needed, coming-of-age development for the system. I would undoubtedly say that Dynamics 365 Talent is starting to become something that warrants much closer attention in future.

Develop Microsoft Flows Using Visio

Microsoft Flow is great. This fact should be self-evident to regular followers of the blog. As a regularly developing, relatively young product, though, it is understandable that some aspects of it require further work. An excellent example of this is the ability to manage the deployment of Flows between different environments or stages. While Flows big brother, Microsoft Logic Apps, has this pretty well covered, the ability to deploy development or concepts Flows repeatedly often ends up being a case of manually creating each Flow again from scratch, which isn’t exactly fun.

The October release promises to change this with the introduction of a specific piece of integration with Microsoft Visio:

Microsoft Visio enables enterprises to capture their business processes using its rich modeling capabilities. Anyone who creates flowcharts or SharePoint workflows can now use Visio to design Microsoft Flow workflows. You can use Visio’s sharing and commenting capabilities to collaborate with multiple stakeholders and arrive at a complete workflow in little time. As requested here, you can publish the workflow to Microsoft Flow, then supply parameters to activate it.

This feature will be available to Visio Online Plan 2 subscription users. Office Insiders can expect early access in July 2018. In the future, you’ll also be able to export existing Flows and modify them in Visio.

Now, it’s worth noting, in particular, the requirement for Visio Online Plan 2 to accommodate this neat piece of functionality. But, assuming this is not an issue for your organisation, the potential here to define Flows locally, share them quickly for approval, and deploy them en masse is enormous, bringing a much-needed degree of automation to a product that currently does not support this. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this in due course.

Custom Fonts in Power BI

Continuing the theme of obligatory Power BI references, my final pick has to be the introduction of Custom Fonts into Power BI, which will be in Public Preview as part of October’s release:

Corporate themes often include specific fonts that are distributed and used throughout the company. You can use those fonts in your Power BI reports.

For any font property, Power BI Desktop will show a complete list of all the fonts installed on your computer. You can choose from these to use in your report. When distributing the report, anyone with the font installed will see it reflected in the report. If the end user doesn’t have it installed, it falls back to the default font.

For those who have particular branding requirements that require accommodation within their Power BI Reports, this new feature completes the puzzle and takes you an additional step further in transforming your reports so that they are almost unrecognisable from a default Power BI Report. Hopefully, the preview period for this new feature will be relatively short and then rolled out as part of general availability.

Conclusions or Wot I Think

The list above is just a flavour of my “choice cuts” of the most exciting features that will be in our hands within the next few months, and I really would urge you to read through the entire document if you have even just a little passing interest in any of the technologies included in these release notes. As you can tell, my list is ever so skewered towards Portals out of everything else. This is for a good reason – ever since Microsoft’s acquisition of ADXStudio a few years back, we have seen some progress in the development of CRM Portals from Microsoft, mainly in the context of integrating the product more tightly for Online users. In my view, this has been the only significant effort we have seen in taking the product forward, with a relatively extensive list of backlog feature requests that looked to have been consigned to the recycling bin. The October Release very much seems to flip this on its head and I am pleased to discover a whole range of new, most clamoured for, features being made available on Portals, which take the product forward in strides and enables organisations to more easily contemplate their introduction.

As you will probably expect based on where things are going in the D365CE space at the moment, the announcements for Flow, PowerApps and the Common Data Service are all very much framed towards the end goal of integrating these and the “old” CRM/D365CE experience together as tightly as possible, a change that should be welcomed. The release notes are also crucial in highlighting the importance of anyone working in this space to be as multi-skilled as possible from a technology standpoint. Microsoft is (quite rightly) encouraging all technology professionals to be fast and reactive to change, and anticipating us to have a diverse range of skills to help the organisations/businesses we work with every day. There is no point in fighting this and, the best way for you to succeed in this climate is to identify the relevant opportunities that you can drive forward from these product announcements and proactively implement as part of the work you are doing each day. In a nutshell, you should know how to deploy a Power BI Dashboard, have familiarity with the type of services that Flow connects to, see the difference between a Canvas and Model-driven PowerApps and – amongst all of this – understand how D365CE solutions operate. Be a Swiss Army Knife as much as possible and deliver as much value and benefit in your role as you possibly can.

Preventing Folder Names With GUID’s in SharePoint (Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 for Enterprise)

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The ability to incorporate document management functionality within Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 for Enterprise (CRM/D365E) is one of the ways that the application integrates neatly with other products in the Microsoft “stack”, giving you the ability to drive further benefit from your existing CRM/D365E deployment. Documents that specifically concern a particular record can be stored within SharePoint and accessed via a few clicks within the application, allowing for quicker collaboration and visibility behind a specific contact, business or sales opportunity. By leveraging the full functionality of SharePoint alongside this, businesses can begin to take advantage of features such as document history, check in/check out capability and the ability to access SharePoint content via the OneDrive desktop client, negating the need to work solely within a web browser to access your documents.

When you are first getting to grips with Document Management, you may come across an oddity with no apparent way of resolving: GUID names are appended onto the names of your SharePoint folders:

There is an understandable reason why this is done (which will be discussed later on in this post), but the folder names can appear jarring and nonsensical to end users of the application. Fortunately, there is a way in which you can change the global setting for this within the application, but it requires making some modifications to your CRM/D365E Organisations global settings – one of those changes that are simple to do if you know how to, but more complex if you don’t 🙂

CRM’s/D365E’s Organisation settings are not exposed within an accessible format natively within the application. To make changes to these settings within the application, the best tool available for both Online and On-Premise versions of the application is the Organization Settings Editor. I have previously discussed how to install and use this tool on the blog, and it is a really straightforward way of updating some of the CRM’s/D365E’s more obscure settings to suit your preferences. The setting that controls all of this is this is the aptly named CreateSPFoldersUsingNameandGuid, which needs to be set to false. Once this is configured, all newly created SharePoint folders will no longer have the GUID appended to them.

How to Fix Existing Folders

It may be the case that you have lots of existing SharePoint folders that are configured in the default manner, but you want to look at “tidying” them up. Simply renaming the SharePoint folder will not work, as CRM/D365E stores “pointers” to each individual folder setup for Document Management, containing a partial URL link; a link that will become broken if anything is modified within SharePoint. To correctly fix your folders and not break anything, you will need to do the following:

  1. Locate the Document Location record within CRM/D365E and modify the Relative URL value to remove the GUID value (e.g. the Document Location record for Test Co5_B3D5C8DFDB77E51181023863BB357C38 should be updated to have a Relative URL value of Test Co5). You may receive a warning that the URL does not exist, which can be safely disregarded.
  2. Rename the folder in SharePoint to match the updated Relative URL value from above.

This could potentially be a laborious task, depending on the number of Document Locations involved. To ease you in your journey, I would recommend digging out the CRM/D365E SDK & the .NET Client API for SharePoint to iteratively update all Document Locations and ditto for all folders within SharePoint online, based on a .csv/spreadsheet input.

Having the ability to make your SharePoint folders look more visually appealing is nice, but keep in mind the following…

By storing a GUID within each folder name, the application can always ensure that the correct folder can be linked back to a CRM record. By implication, this also facilitates situations where duplicate record names are allowed within your environment (for example, you could have two Account records both called Test Company Ltd). By overriding the above setting within the application, you lose the ability to support duplicate folder names; instead, the application will resolve back to any existing folder that matches the Name of the record, essentially becoming a document repository for 2 records as opposed to 1.

An example can better demonstrate this. Below is a test Account record that has been setup for Document Management – with a few test documents saved within and a Document folder successfully configured in SharePoint called My Test Account:

When we then go and create a brand new Account record with the same name – My Test Account – and go to configure Document Management, we are asked to confirm the creation of a Folder with the same name as the one already setup:

Once confirmed, instead of seeing a blank folder, all of the test documents set up on the similarly named record are visible – because the application is pointing to the folder above:

It is highly unlikely that you would allow duplicate record names in the first place within your CRM/D365E instance (particularly for entity types such as Account), so this may be a concern that requires little notice. However, be sure to perform a full analysis of the all the record types that you are hoping to use with Document Management, as there is no way to fine tune the global setting to accommodate specific entities – it is all or nothing.

Conclusions or Wot I Think

Keeping things looking tidy and non-technical are endeavours that need to drive any successful software deployment. End users who exposed to strange looking, “techie” stuff as part of working with a system day in day out may soon start to lose faith in a system, hampering user adoption and faith that it is fit for purpose. Removing GUID’s from a SharePoint folder can obviously present some serious technical problems, depending on the nature of your deployment; but it is arguably something that you should consider if you want to ensure that end users feel that their SharePoint folders are “correctly” named (i.e. do not contain superfluous information). As with anything in IT, proper testing must be carried out for all possible scenarios before rolling out a feature change like this and, assuming your business ticks all of the boxes for safely removing GUID’s from your SharePoint folders, it is definitely something to be considered seriously.