Embedded Power BI in Dynamics NAV

Recently, Encore hosted an event: “What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017”. We presented the best new Features in Dynamics NAV 2017, including Embedded Power BI. enjoy!

Video will start playing at the correct point in the presentation.

Transcript:

So the next thing I wanted to take a look at is embedded Power BI. So this does require…or this and Edit-in Excel does require that you authenticate through Azure Active Directory, which is a free part of Azure. You can’t do this if you’re authenticating the traditional way because Power BI is a service that you have to authenticate with…it’s a cloud service so you have to authenticate with something. We authenticate it with Azure.
So that’s a fairly simple process to link your users to that Azure Active Directory. So, there’s little technical step to make this work and the Edit-in Excel. But just to give you an idea what we’re looking at. Essentially…let me login to the web client.

So I’m logged in with my Office 365 user in this case. We have, for those of you who don’t know, we’ve had single sign-on for a while. So if you’re using Office 365, one username, password will log you in to the NAV, Dynamics CRM, Word, Excel, all those things. That’s how I connect to my NAV. I’ve got all the different applications that I use within my subscription. So I have Power BI, Word, Excel, those types of things.

Gonna take a look at Power BI and this…what I’m about to show is happening in NAV 2016. We essentially published what’s called the Content Pack for Power BI. So you can simply go to services in Power BI. You can sign up for Power BI, even the free version will allow you to do this by the way. You can sign up for the free Power BI as an individual user. The main difference between the free and the paid Power BI is if you build reports and content, you can’t share it with your colleagues in your company because you’re signing up individually to just use this Power BI for free. If you want to build content that is shared across the company then you get into the paid version.

But you’ll see down here there’s a little app called Microsoft Dynamics NAV. So if you have 2016, you can just go sign up for power BI for free. Go click on this and hit on GET and then you got to put your URL, your username and your password, and it will bring in everything you see here. It’s called a Content Pack. And what I’m showing you on this screen is essentially the out-of-the-box content that comes with that Power BI. Okay. And once you’re in Power BI, you can do things like sales by, I don’t know, customer and region.

So you can just sort of ask it questions in natural query language and it’ll actually go out and build…oops, I forgot…You know you can just ask it questions in natural query language and that’s gonna go ahead and create those reports based on those questions. And in this case, I’d say give me a map sales by customer, by region, and I can drill in and out of those then I can pin it to the dashboard. Okay.

So once you’ve created…these reports come with it and you can create others by asking questions or you can get a little more technical and design those reports. Once you’ve created reports, you now have the ability…let’s go back over to NAV. You now have the ability to…you have the ability to publish those on the Role pages. So if I go down this Role page, I’ve published a Power BI reports specifically to my Role page. Okay, so in this case I’ve got a map of some sales and things. I’m gonna expand that out so we can see a bit better. But essentially, I can design a report, I can put slicers on it and then I can publish it out to Role page for users.

This is a pretty simple one where I’ve put some sales information but I can say I want to see it for just Amy, and we see Amy work primarily in Europe. I want to see it just for Spencer, and, you know, you can easily put five, six slicers that affect those graphs and those reports and you can publish it right out to your dashboard. So if you’re looking for ad hoc reporting, you know, “I got a business issue today.” It’s a great tool.
I have one customer I saw a few weeks ago, the production manager, you know, when he starts his day he showed me how he starts his day now. He goes, you know, “Who is absent?” And he gets to list of who hasn’t clocked in, you know, and then he says, “Show me my yield by resource.” And it gives him his yield for the shift that night. You know and then if he’s got a problem, he can ask questions and go further down the line. So it really facilitates that kinda ad hoc reporting. And traditionally today, you have to go out to your IT group and ask them design a new report and create that kind of report. You can do a lot with that ad hoc query, and then you can publish out the reports that you think are useful on a daily basis into Dynamics NAV, right on the dashboard, and you can show those out to your colleagues. Any questions there?