Listen, Power BI is pretty amazing. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t already sort of believe that. I’m guessing I don’t have to convince you anymore that, all things considered, developing Power BI reports is relatively easy. In fact, I probably don’t even have to prove that licensing and TCO is lower than our competitors. The majority of questions/concerns/fears I hear from customers these days are around proper deployment and administration of the tool. If any of the below questions ring a bell, this article is for you. (Side note: see my prior post here for best practices around tenant-level […] Read More
I’ve had a handful of customers ask me recently about best practices when it comes to tenant administration and governance. This is an incredibly important topic for obvious reasons and I thought it would be helpful to make public my recommendations for others to reference. For this article, I’m just going to focus on the Tenant Settings available inside the Power BI Admin Portal. By no means an exhaustive set of Power BI best practices, nor a recommendation for every setting within the Admin Portal – I’d definitely encourage you to check out my other articles as well as my […] Read More
Recap In the first post of this series, I introduced the concept of what I’m calling common sense solutions. These are scenarios where I’m trying to solve common business problems in a way that’s repeatable, automated, and makes our jobs easier and more enjoyable. The ultimate goal is once the solution is in place, it becomes common sense to keep solving it that way. This first series is focused on automating event management using nothing but Power BI and Office 365. And if you recall in part one, we created a registration process consisting of a Microsoft Form to capture […] Read More
Prelude I met up with a friend and former colleague last week who gave me possibly the greatest compliment I’ve ever received. He told me the thing he respected most about me was I always came across to him as a common sense guy. He was my first ever hire as a manager. It was such a great thing for him to say and it meant a ton. Hearing him say that and learning he believed that about me, I started to ask myself: Why don’t I believe that about me? So, right or wrong, I’m going to start believing […] Read More
Let’s take a journey together. I want you to imagine you’re evaluating Power BI for your organization. You’ve already heard the marketing spiel and seen a live demo. You know the breakdown between a free and Pro license. You even believe that weird Dawg Data guy that the product really is as sexy and powerful as he says it is. You believe it could potentially have a place in your organization. But you have questions – lots of them. How do I roll this out enterprise wide for my 10,000 users? What’s the end user experience like? Which license(s) […] Read More
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but self-service BI is all the rage these days. I honestly can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with a customer that didn’t involve self-service. I mean, it makes perfect sense. Business users are the ones who know their data the best. They’re the ones saying “why do I have to keep waiting weeks or months for IT to provide me insights on a topic I know better than anyone in my organization?” The answer is simple and one we all know: for years we’ve had to rely on IT because of the […] Read More
I recently had a customer ask about a specific scenario involving Power BI’s On-Prem Data Gateway and thought it would be helpful to clear the air about how the gateway is used and the different types of roles and data connectivity methods involved. To quote official Microsoft docs, the On-Premises Data Gateway “acts as a bridge providing quick and secure data between on-premises data and the Power BI, Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps, and PowerApps services.” Personally I love that Microsoft uses the term bridge, because I believe that’s the best analogy to describe the tool, and will be the analogy […] Read More