2,500 people sat in the semi-darkness of the MS Data Insight Summit, joining who knows how many watching the live stream, watching and listening to the upcoming changes to Power BI. Some of the announcements were expected, like the General Availability [GA] release of Power BI Premium and Power BI Report Server on June 12. Although there is a lot of documentation on both products, there was still more information to be learned now they are released. Microsoft also announced they were creating a new product offering, Power BI Embedded. As part of the product realignment, the ability to embed Power BI into applications was moved to only being a Premier feature. This move caused an uproar in the marketplace as many companies wanted to continue using Power BI Embedded, but could not justify paying Power BI Premier pricing. Power BI Embedded was created to address the sticker shock. This new Power BI product has two different pricing levels, EM1 and EM2, starting at $625 per month. Not a whole lot of information has been publicly released regarding Power BI Embedded, but it is designed to have a limited feature set, focused on just embedding Power BI.
Power BI Upcoming Features
Microsoft demonstrated some upcoming features of desktop which were predictably very impressive. They created an amazing time line custom visual which I really hope to use soon. Another neat feature which was demonstrated in the keynote was drill down pages. This feature allows users to create pages which will be displayed when the field is selected on the previous screen, and the data will reflect the selection. As there can be a lot of different filters which can be created for Power BI, a new bookmark feature will be coming soon which will allow users to save the context of the report, which saves all of the selections made with all of the slicers. With this feature, the next time the report is viewed, only the selections people find important will be accessed. These new features are scheduled for released in the next three months.
Power BI Community
Art credit to Josh Sivey who was kind enough to send this
One of the last things that Microsoft did was to thank the user community for their involvement with Power BI. Since many of the new features added are based upon feedback from the user community, Microsoft really works hard to engage the larger user community to help share information regarding the product as well as mine the ideas from https://ideas.powerbi.com . It was nice of Microsoft to recognize people in the community. Even though the slide was not up for very long, lots of people notice who was recognized.
There is material for a number of other posts from this conference, so please subscribe to hear more information about Power BI very soon.
Yours Always
Ginger Grant
Data aficionado et SQL Raconteur