There were some interesting takeaways from the Microsoft Data Insights conference that was just held in Bellevue, WA, on March 22 and 23. This was the first conference hosted by Microsoft that focuses on business intelligence, and there were about 1200 people in attendance, representing companies across all industries. Microsoft also streamed many of the sessions via the powerbi.com web site.
The main product from Microsoft that enables business intelligence for users is their PowerBI product. PowerBI is a suite of tools that puts the ability to create dashboards and KPIs in the hands of business users for the first time. The PowerBI service is hosted on Microsoft Azure servers, so much of the heavy lifting for reporting analysis is done in the cloud. Users can securely access their reports from their desktop computer or most mobile devices, and Microsoft announced at the conference that you can even view your PowerBI dashboards on your Apple Watch! One point worth mentioning is that Microsoft publishes new versions of the PowerBI Desktop each month, and makes updates to the PowerBI service in the cloud almost weekly. That is an impressive delivery cadence for even a small development shop, much less a company the size of Microsoft. They are focused and passionate about the Power BI solution!
There were several announcements and sessions at the Data Insights conference that I’m really excited about.
I was most excited to hear that Microsoft has added role level security to the data models for reporting. This is an important enterprise class feature in that now you can have a dataset extracted from your ERP system or CRM system and define groups for users that are restricted to see datacwith specific attributes. For example, maybe you only want your sales staff to see data in a specific region. With the new role level security, you can include “Region” in your data set and the role definition will automatically restrict the reports for the user to their region. Another example would be companies that have business units in different countries. A common use case for Tensoft customers is that corporate HQ users, such as the CFO or Controller, need to see financial data across all business units, but they want to limit business unit managers to only see their country data. With this enhancement to PowerBI, you can now put users into roles that give them access to the data they need – without having to create separate data sets and separate dashboard reports by “role.”
Another powerful feature announced at the conference was deeper integration with Microsoft Excel. This means that datasets stored in the PowerBI platform can be used as a data source for Excel, giving users the ability to analyze PowerBI data in Excel.
Finally, looking towards the future, Microsoft demonstrated an add-in to Excel for Machine Learning that was very cool. The Microsoft AzureML add-in will process a set of data and make insights or predictions based on the information that was used to train it. Based on the training, using historical data, you can provide new information into the AzureML engine and it will predict the outcome. Machine Learning is early on in how it will contribute to Microsoft’s PowerBI suite, but it’s clear it will give users even more analytic power to forecast in the future.
The main takeaway from the conference is that Microsoft is investing heavily in Modern BI with the vision of making it easier to analyze data and share insights using PowerBI. Microsoft sees the future of Modern BI as the ability to take ACTION on insights, so they are focused on aligning their business units to make that happen. They mentioned that the PowerBI team is working with the Dynamics business unit, the Office business unit, and Azure to layout a future where access to Business Intelligence tools are truly available to anyone who needs them.
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