To date my reports and dashboards have been shared with co-workers within my current organisation but in the future I will be working on projects with various clients simultaneously and will need to be able to develop and then share my work with employees of these businesses. Is there any content created that details how I go about doing this?
I am in effect going to be developing content packs for specific industries based on tailored Dynamics 365 offerings and then tweaking these for each client
Hope that makes sense and would massively appreciate any advice / ideas / content that could be share around this concept
I have set a parameter to hold the different database source files and logins. Have you look at creating templates in Power BI or parameterising your source connections? you then can change the data source as required and publish to organisation required. I just created a report template where i can just change the company ID to grad a different data sets using same code.
So there a few options here around both development and for distribution.
Regarding development. Garry is right, parameters & templates are the best way to go here and will save an immense amount of time as you can create the one report and make small adjustments to change the detail within them.
Being able to change parameters at the query level is a better solution when looking to share externally.
Regarding distribution, I think ultimately you will need to pass over the Power BI desktop reports to the external counterparty, unless you want to go down the Power BI embedded route. Which adds a bit of complexity to your project, well a lot more in my view.
How I work with clients is either use the publish to web feature, to share work with them or they have setup with up with a license of their side and I ‘act’ as an employee essentially developing in their own environment.
It’s a good point Sam and as Report Authors and Consultants we should really consider this point of distribution and also maitenance of your BI models.
How you build reports and share the content is really important in building a solution that is KISS. Again like Sam said avoid complexities.
This is the approach I have adopted as well. Do you teach your clients to update their data Sam or do you use refresh service?
There is also now the B2B with Office 365 clients too…which involves your IT department…
MS are having to cater to so many requirements with sharing I hope that it doesn’t go too complicated from here. If the embedded product was easier & less expensive to implement that would have been the most preferable from my perspective, but there are alternatives which is a plus.
Personally I tend to stay away from the back-end updating/refreshing piece and also core data infrastructure with clients. I focus on Power BI and how to implement it analytical and leave client to do the rest as they understand all the naunces with data warehouses and custom apps etc.
Following on from the above. I have been working with a client who is completely new to Power BI to develop a mock-up report using a simple Excel data source in readiness for when their brand new D365 system is rolled out, within which they are only going to have access to Power BI via embedded.
Their D365 development is now at a stage where I can hook up my template to the entity store via SQL Server direct query but I seem to have hit a blocker at the very first stage… you are unable to combine import and direct query modes in the same report
I’ve spent a long time with the client honing the design to match what they want and really don’t want to have to replicate this from scratch - I was hoping there would be a way to transpose my existing work onto the entity store - any ideas?
Yes this is correct you can’t combine them right now. I’m not sure when/if this will ever be improved upon and there are many reasons why it’s like this in the first place.
Regarding the ‘entity store’, this really isn’t something I’ve dived into myself at all, so I’d be struggling to give good advice on this.
Hopefully there may be other available who have look into this further.
