A Quick Guide to Power BI Reporting Integrations
Having a large variety of software applications in your IT infrastructure can be difficult to report on with Power BI. Not only do you have trouble connecting all of them to a single semantic model, but its also challenging to have a single place for reporting.
For example, consider the following company’s IT systems:
Marketing data locations: MailChimp, Google Analytics, and LinkedIn
Sales data location: Salesforce
ERP data location: SAP
All of these systems are disconnected because they’re owned by different companies and need to be setup properly to talk to each other and, most importantly, talk to Power BI. Even when you do discover a way to create a reporting model, you have to ask yourself how do you choose where to consume reports? What flexibility does Power BI have in making reports available?
In this post, I’ll be going over some of the methods of consuming Power BI reports and some of the advantages/disadvantages of each method. That way you can be closer to answering the questions above and deciding where you want end-users to see your reports. There are many options that will fit your company’s needs. Remember that integrations are not exclusive to each other, and you are free to utilize multiple ones simultaneously.
Power BI Ecosystem
Starting with the most common ways of administering reports, these are within the “ecosystem” of Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. Power BI is utilized here in the most innovative ways. This is where any new feature, technology, or update is incorporated, allowing you to create with complete freedom.
Power BI Web Service
Most users are familiar with this service as its where Power BI reports and models are initially published. Almost all integrations require your report to be published here first after creating the model with Power BI desktop. Use it for the following advantages:
Workspaces for managing team access and report distribution
Create apps dedicated to end-user report consumption
Build reports and dashboards off of existing reports and semantic models
Manage your model’s dataflows to see which reports are getting what data
Power BI web service is also where you go to change report refresh settings, add data source credentials, and manage settings through the admin center. No installation or paid license (as long as you’re not sharing the report) is required to use this service and is the main choice for Power BI report consumption.
Power BI Mobile App
This is essentially an extension of the Power BI web service except with some mobile-friendly features. Its my choice of report consumption since I usually check metrics at the beginning and end of the day, when I’m not at my computer. The app is free on your mobile device’s app store.
Some key features:
Alerts - get notified instantly on your device when data changes
Tab for targets - track progress vital metrics
Collaboration - comment on visuals and tag people instead of always doing it from your desktop or sending an email
Customization - optimize the mobile dashboard for what’s best for you and the way you work. No more sifting through a bunch of KPIs that don’t mean anything to you and get to the important metrics.
Of course, the greatest feature is the ability to take your mobile device anywhere and complete your tasks with Power BI. Waiting for coffee but need to fix an urgent performance issue? Open the app, go to the report and visual with poor performance, comment on it and tag someone who can help fix it, done. They'll receive an email containing your comment and real-time data from the report, clearly explaining the situation and highlighting its importance with specific metrics.
Check out some of the key features of all the Power Platform mobile applications in my other article.
Custom Development
Sometimes you need to make Power BI reports usable in ways that go beyond what the web service offers. This may be simply making a report embedded in an existing application, or changing the type of report itself to reach a different audience.
Embedded Reports
The great thing about Power BI is that the data models are managed separately from the actual reports themselves. This means that you may have one model that’s constantly refreshing and giving you real-time data, but you can make 3 different reports from this data.
Embedded reports take advantage of this concept by allowing developers to actually add reports, dashboards, and visuals into a custom application or website. Users can then interact with that report through that service instead of going to the Power BI website or mobile app.
Do your end-users already use your website or portal for their work? Great, embed a Power BI report there too and bring the visibility to them.
Its worth noting that embedding a report requires a pro or premium license for development.
Paginated Reports
As the name suggests, these are reports designed for pages and printing. They are designed to fit well on a page and differ from traditional BI because they give more detailed information rather than KPIs.
Often these are made for operational reports and financial statements, like a balance sheet. Reports can be viewed in the web service, mobile app, or emailed directly to specific users depending on what they need to see. You can export them from the service in a number of formats, like HTML, excel, word, etc.
Paginated reports can also be added as a visual to an existing BI report. This way you can organize all your related reports in one screen, so users don’t have to jump around reports.
Similar to embedded reports, paginated reports requires a premium license to develop.
Development Integrations
Did you know that you can use other Microsoft products to develop and integrate Power BI reports in? These development integrations allow you to use their systems to create reports and dashboards on existing data and models. That way, if your teams are using these applications everyday already, then you can extend Power BI to the applications they’re already familiar with. No more telling employees to hop to a different software and making their working systems more complicated.
Power Apps
Power BI and Power Apps integrations can be done in 2 ways:
Model-driven Power Apps
Canvas Power Apps
Canvas apps uses the Power BI tile to get data from your report whereas model-driven apps lets you build an entire page and dashboard within the app itself.
If you're well-versed in Power Apps, you're aware that you can enhance your model-driven app with a canvas app, giving developers greater control over the content. In my view, it's advisable to opt for canvas apps for integrating Power BI when possible. You get more development flexibility and can position the Power BI tiles freely throughout the canvas.
Teams
With Power BI’s Teams integration you can create, edit, and view reports directly from the application. Its basically a mini version of the Power BI web service, but it lives inside Teams.
Odds are your company is already using teams as its main way of collaboration. Now you can simply add your reports directly as a tab in a teams channel and start enhancing that collaboration.
Functionality is a bit limited as you’ll be getting a standard report interaction screen like the one you see on the left. However, if you’ve decided your report output is going to be for teams, then design your reports with this in mind.
For example, add more pages for detailed information, use tooltips to leverage more of the space you already have, or put buttons on your pages to navigate quicker between data.
Pre-Built Integrations
These are integrations where PowerBI is a feature inside of these systems. They have ways to create, edit, and share your Power BI reports if you already have a license for these systems. You may need a pro or premium Power BI license to utilize the full Power BI features, especially sharing, so please check with your license provider about what your license covers.
For the list below, I’m only including the most common Microsoft products with pre-built integrations. Otherwise, the list will be too long if I tried to fit ALL pre-built Power BI integrations.
Dynamics CRM (CE)
Just to clear things up, when I say Dynamics CRM, I'm referring to the whole set of customer engagement apps that Power BI can link up with. This includes Dynamics Sales, Marketing, and Field Service.
What's really cool about hooking Power BI up with Dynamics 365 is that these apps are pretty much model-driven Power Apps. So, you get to tweak your Power BI integration just like you would with a Power App, but it's all happening right inside Dynamics 365.
Actually, Dynamics 365 is built right on top of the Power Platform. Apart from the ready-made reports that come with these apps, you can whip up any Power BI report based on CRM data and then share those reports back in CRM for everyone to use.
Business Central
With Business Central,You not only get a Power BI visual displaying all your reports on your homepage (as shown on the left), but also the backend is conveniently configurable for reporting purposes.
The best part is that you only need a free Power BI license to create a report and publish it into Business Central. This is because Business Central pulls reports from your workspaces, which doesn’t only requires a free license to publish.
You can also embed Power BI reports directly into Business Central pages if you’d like. With this feature, users can see the real-time reports they need in their standard working pages instead of always in their home screen. For example, if your collections manager is always on the customers page, then you can embed your collections report there.
Dynamics Finance and Operations
Power BI is well integrated with Finance and Operations with some of its out-of-the-box reports directly inside of the application itself. Navigating to some of the role workspaces will bring you to a page specific to that role with Power BI reports already up and running.
For example, on the left we see a cash management report as part of the cash and bank management workspace. You can see on the right there’s also filters that can be toggled to give tailored view of your data, and some charts that come pre-filled with your historical financial data.
A paid Power BI license is not required for these reports to be available, but you must connect your Dynamics instance to Power Platform to enable it.
At its core, Power BI is about one thing: output.
Whether you have that output integrated via a custom report or within an out-of-the-box format in your ERP system, choosing the right reporting option(s) must consider your users. Make something that integrates with their daily lives and not something they have to go out of their way to use. The choice of integration should be seamless and, above all, dictate how your report will be developed. Each reporting option has different features for that medium, so your reports need to be designed with the medium in mind. I see many projects fail to make an impact because report adoption isn’t considered until after the project completion, if at all.
Don’t let this happen to you and your organization. Begin with the end in mind, put yourself in the shoes of the user, and make reports people actually gain insights from.
For more on Power BI and the rest of the Power Platform, follow me on LinkedIn and keep up with Elara. I post a new article weekly.
