TOP 6 announcements in the PowerBI world in March and April 2019 (so far)
It is simply amazing! PowerBI is one of the first Microsoft products that I know of, that has a clear and public roadmap. And not only that, but it is absolutely thrilling to see the Product group delivering promised features on time. And even more than that!
The last week of March and the first two of April are full of evidence on that. And I know it is hard to keep up with all announcements, so here is a quick roundup of all major updates and new features. If you are curious and want to dig deeper – enjoy our top 6 list!
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Power BI open-platform connectivity with XMLA endpoints public preview |
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XMLA endpoints enable open-platform connectivity to Power BI datasets. This is only a Premium Capacity feature and enable scenarios like connecting directly to the Analysis Services Tabular engine, running behind the scenes, ability to do diff changes between models, implement governance and many more. |
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Links: Announcement, Documentation, Example use cases |
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Creating Machine Learning models in Power BI |
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Power BI Dataflows offer a simple and powerful ETL tool that enables analysts to prepare data for further analytics. You invest significant effort in data cleansing and preparation, creating datasets that can be used across your organization. AutoML enables you to leverage your data prep effort for building machine learning models directly in Power BI. |
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April 2019 Power BI Desktop Release |
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Bunch of new features packed in a new release! What are my favorites? Drill-through reports enables quite some enterprise reporting scenarios, along with the filtering pane improvements. Not that the rest of the new things are not exciting, but from my perspective, and with all the PowerBI projects I am working on, those two will definitely bring value to customers. |
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Links:Announcement |
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Report Builder for PowerBI Paginated reports |
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This application will act as the primary authoring experience for paginated reports in the Power BI service going forward. By creating a new authoring tool for paginated reports in Power BI, separate from SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder, we can provide a familiar experience, but specifically optimize for publishing to the Power BI Service. |
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Power BI dataflows general availability |
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This is just big! If you have not tried PowerBI Dataflow, you have not realized its power and importance in the modern BI and Analytics world. It provides a self-service data prep and management experience within Power BI, allowing users to collect business data from various sources, clean and transform it — leveraging the familiar Power Query experience and the Common Data Model and land it into Power BI storage, making it available for reuse by multiple Power BI datasets. |
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Links: Announcement, Documentation; Data Lake Gen 2 Integration |
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Power BI Mobile apps now support Azure AD B2B guest users |
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Previously, if you need to share a PowerBI report or a dashboard with a partner organization (outside your tenant/AAD), they could only do it from the Shared with me experience. Now, those external partners can access such content via PowerBI App as well, enabling better B2B reporting. |
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Links: Announcement, Documentation, Whitepaper |
Oh, and by the way, this library by Joël CREST (blog|twitter) is an absolute treasure for all of us, who do not have the time to read all materials and enjoy learning by watching videos