Business Intelligence
Power BI
Self-service Reporting
Enable users to create their own charts, and perform their own analysis
Data Warehouse
Organize your data to make reporting figures standardized and multi-purposed
Self-service Reporting
Power BI enables users to create their own charts based on the data source provided. This data source can be in many formats, such as Excel, Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, a SharePoint list, SQL, or Oracle.
Once the data is connected to Power BI, licensed users can create charts. This is done via a simple interface, where a chart type is selected, and certain fields are chosen for the X-axis and Y-axis. The Power BI interface is built so that users can easily perform their own "self-service reporting" to create information displays, with a minimum of training, due to the intuitive interface. Only licensed users can create charts, but unlicensed users can view them, and make use of the filter options and other display buttons set up by the chart's creator.
Charts can be filtered and tweaked by users to better display the data. Licensed users can modify the display by altering the chart ranges, or setting false values to be ignored.
Self-service reporting means that reporting can be brought into the hands of the very people who are acting based on the findings of a report. Power BI makes reporting a simpler process, so that more people can engage in creating reports based directly on the data.
Charts created using regular features are available to be freely shared to unlicensed users, but charts created using advanced Pro features require viewers to also have a Power BI license.
Dashboards
Dashboards are a way of displaying multiple charts together, typically also with a list, such as a table of point-of-sale transactions. Both licensed and unlicensed users can perform "drill-downs" on dashboards by clicking on any chart piece, such as a node on a graph or a slice of a pie chart.
Dashboards can be used to simply display many charts at once, or can be made into complex interactive displays, without extra coding.
Dashboards can be shared to unlicensed users, teams, or groups.
Data Warehouse
A data warehouse model can clean up messy entries made by users, by fixing common spelling mistakes and inconsistencies to match in with the regular records.
Data warehouse models are becoming the keystone for today's reporting solutions. By creating a standardized mid-point for data, reports can be more easily created to provide information on shifting subjects of analysis, now and into the future.
Creating a data warehouse gives you the opportunity to standardize the formulas that make up your reports, so that every report pulls from the same database, and presents consistent information.
Implementing a data warehouse model can resolve issues of data standardization, and drastically reduce the effort it takes to build an accurate report. At the same time, we can clean up your existing archives, to restore valuable historical data.
A data warehouse model focuses all the technical work that goes into building reports and brings it to the background, leaving users with useful, consistent, easy-to-use data at the top layer. This layer is then brought into Power BI, to provide a simple and refined experience.
Teams
Teams and Groups, both ways of organizing users in Office 365, can be used in Power BI as well. Dashboards can be deployed to specific groups, which might represent certain departments. These groups can share and collaborate on Dashboards to construct and modify visuals.
Power BI visualizations can be embedded into SharePoint, CRM, websites, blogs, and more.
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