Hello,
I’m looking for recommendations - or best practices - in promoting awareness of the Power BI reports available in my organization. I’m sure there are recorded webinars or like content which address this topic, and having your insights is always welcome.
My organization consists of dozens of operating groups and functional teams which produce PBI reports & dashboards across dozens of workspaces. There’s foundation reports built from SSAS cubes or SQL Server tables sourced from an EDW, and then hundreds of reports from a variety of application sources typically utilizing file extracts. We utilize Premium workspace capacity.
The goal is a well-maintained, searchable repository of published PBI reports & datasets, and the best practices come into play with the breadth of report attributes included, the accuracy & timeliness of the report attribute data, and how effective the search capabilities are. Sharepoint is envisioned as that searchable repository.
While searchable, the default view would likely be a scrollable list of all reports with some organization or sorting by “function”. Unfortunately, Workspace Names are likely not suitable as report “categories or functional groups”, but we may not have a better approach to categorizing reports.
Attributes of interest:
Report title
Report description / purpose
Report URL (implies Workspace ID and Report ID)
Report thumbnail image
Target audience
Access control requirements (how does a user get access)
Report owner/contact
Key measures or columns (seen as keywords in searching more so than formal data dictionary definitions)
Is a user guide or FAQs available? If yes, URL location?
Data sources by name
Method/type of data source connection (on-premise DB, file-based, published dataset, Cloud)
Data/report refresh schedule (multiple times daily, daily, weekly, monthly)
Business Function or Report Category as earlier described
Of course, some of these report/dashboard attributes are more useful than others, so balancing “completeness” of data with on-going maintenance is another best practice consideration.
Naturally, as much of the report attributes for the inventory which can be derived from Admin REST APIs or other means of assessing the pbi service is a plus. Experiences or practices of report builders can do with the published reports themselves to support such an inventory would be very helpful. What “should” report builders provide within PBI itself to support a searchable inventory?
Please point me to some good references or white papers here.
Thank you,
Kevin