Last year I blogged about Workspaces in Dynamics 365 as a concept. At this year’s Tech Conference, TJ Vasser talked about some of the newly available features on the reporting side. TJ highlighted his own blog post about the various reporting options available for Dynamics 365 for Operations.
Analytical Workspaces
Up until March 2017, the only option for bringing Power BI content into D365O was to publish content packs in PowerBI.com, and each user had to link a Workspace to that published content pack. With Platform Update 4, it’s now possible to embed Power BI content packs directly into a Workspace. Embedding Power BI into Workspaces should remove much of the effort from the end user, and shifts the work to reporting analysts and developers.
The major components of the embedded experience are:
- Adding a new form, or adding a Workspace tab.
- Defining the .pbix files that are embedded in the Workspace.
- Writing a controller class that links the .pbix file to the form, manages filters and security, and defines drill-through experiences.
It’s Not All Rainbows
There are many caveats to this story – when investigating D365O and Power BI features, it’s always a good idea to prototype the entire process before building out any specific feature. Some of the caveats for the embedded reports include:
- Currently only Entity store is supported; using your own database (BYODB) is unsupported.
- Embedded Power BI requires a developer and code promotion; publishing to PowerBI.com is easier to make fast changes.
- It is possible to drill through from the embedded report, but each drill-through experiences require an Event handler in code.
- There are better options for dynamic filtering experiences, but these also require development.
Summary
Simplifying the user experience and bringing reporting into the app will make embedded Power BI a powerful tool. I anticipate quite a bit of development effort to provide awesome experiences. I also suspect the change management process for embedded could be problematic. It’s a good step in the right direction and is worth exploring.
Joel Leichty 