What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business analytics service provided by Microsoft. It provides interactive visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities, where end users can create reports and dashboards by themselves, without having to depend on any technical person or a database administrator

Power BI provides cloud-based BI services, known as Power BI Services, along with a desktop based interface, called Power BI desktop. It offers data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboards. In March 2016, Microsoft released an additional service called Power BI Embedded on its Azure cloud platform. One main differentiator of the product is the ability to load custom visualizations

Why Power BI

Unlike traditional BI tools, such as SSRS, Tableau, Qlik, etc., are solutions for analysts that provide rearview mirror intelligence on what has happened. In contrast, Power BI is business analytics service that can empower everyone—not just data specialists—with real- time insight to what is happening. With Power BI, we can interact with the report and gets the data in the report.

The Power BI is useful in

Business intelligence creation into the hands of analysts who can extract source data, create a dataset, transform or manipulate the data, visualize the data and publish the resulting reports and dashboards. For progressive or iterative analysis, analysts can evolve the BI with new measures or dimensions without requiring IT involvement.

The Question and Answer (Q&A) function may be the top cited benefit and capability in achieving self-service BI.

The dashboard visualizations are best in class and continually updated from the community. Interactive geo-map will gives the best visualizations.

Steps to Create Power BI report:

· We can use Power BI online or download Power BI for Desktop from Web and install on your machine. Open Power BI for Desktop, below screen will appear.

· Now in order to connect to CRM in Power BI, click on “Get Data” item on top left of the ribbon as shown in below screen.

· After clicking “Get Data”, a pop up window will appear, were Microsoft provides various OOTB sources to connect through Power BI. In our scenario we consider Online Services and then Dynamics 365 (online) as highlighted in below screen

· Click connect and then a pop up will appear which asks Web API URL of MS CRM as seen in below screen

· Enter the Dynamics 365 (online) OData endpoint URL. It should look similar to this URL, where Organization Name is the name of your Dynamics 365 (online) organization, and v8.1 is the version. Click OK.

Ex: https://OrganizationName.api.crm.dynamics.com/api/data/v8.1

You can find your OData endpoint URL in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 web client. Go to Settings > Customizations > Developer Resources and locate the URL under Instance Web API.

· Create a trail account for Power BI using Dynamics 365 trail account. The Trail period for Power BI will 60 days.

· After clicking OK, another Pop up screen will appear and then from Organizational account sign in using Power BI and then Click connect from below screen.

· After clicking connect you will be redirected to below screen where Entities of your organization will be displayed and you need to select Entity/Entities then click load.

· After Clicking Load, The Entity Attribute Data will be loaded in Field Section on the Right side of the screen and you can select Fields and Visualization Types, then data will be appeared on the screen in the form of visualizations type.

We created a Custom entity where Name, City and Amount as attributes for that entity and created a few records.

After following the above criteria, consider visualization type as Table, Data will displayed in the Table format and Sum aggregation of Amount field will be displayed at the bottom of Amount row, The Aggregates can be applied on all the fields depends on the type of that Field.

The Data Table can be displayed as below Screen

Visualization Types:

In the visualization panel, there are different types of visualization present in Power BI

· The above table data can be represented in Pie chart and on Maps. If we hover the mouse to the desired block on report then information will be displayed on that particular block.

· After Completion of report. Click Publish Icon which is on top of Screen

· Now open Power BI Online

· The report will be seen in the reports section on the left side of the screen. Click on that report and click Pin live page icon which is on top of the screen as seen below

· By clicking on “Pin Live Page” a pop up will appear which gives an option to create this report in new Dashboard or in an Existing Dashboard. Provide a name to new Dashboard and click on “Pin live”.

Enable Power BI visualizations in the CRM D365

1. Sign-in to Microsoft Dynamics 365 as a user with the system administrator security role.
2. Go to Settings > Administration > System Settings.
3. On the Reporting tab in the Allow Power BI visualization embedding option, select Yes to enable or No to disable.
4. Click OK.

· After Enabling the Power BI in our organization. When we click on New Dashboard on Home Screen then two options will appear on screen as below

· Then after click Power BI Dashboard a pop up will appear as below screen

· Finally Power BI report will be displayed on the Dashboard as

Major Advantage:

No need to write code or be a stats guru to get actionable insights. Power BI Q&A allows you to ask questions and get super-fast answers in the form of charts and graphs ready for pinning to your dashboards.

Drawbacks:

· The integration to Dynamics CRM is limited. Power BI can extract CRM data via an OData feed (Web API URL), so getting the CRM data into the data model is easy, but thereafter there's no supported method to view the CRM reports and dashboards within the CRM application. Requiring users to log in to a different application to view dashboards creates a tough time for user.

· Power BI reports and dashboards cannot pass user, account or other entity parameters. This makes it impossible to create entity specific dashboards such as a dashboard for an account, opportunity, case, or campaign.