Earlier this month (July 2015) Microsoft announced that PowerBI will hit general availability on July 24th. Now that we are only a few days away, let's take a moment to review what this means, and what we can expect once PowerBI goes GA. There are A LOT of exciting new features that have been added to product, so if you haven't taken a look at PowerBI recenty, now is the time! Here are some of the newer features I think you will find most exciting!
Design
If you have used PowerBI in preview, you may have noticed that the visual design aspect was very limited, PowerBI will now feature more robust design experience, new graph charts/controls, and more:
- Rich control over visual coloring, including conditional formatting in Reports
- Visual formatting and customization in Reports (Title, Background Color, Legend, Data Labels, and X/Y axis for Cartesian charts)
- Support for Hyperlinks in Reports and report tables
- Report publishing directly from Power BI Desktop to the PowerBI.com service
- New visuals – Tree Map, Combo Chart, Funnel, Gauges, Area Map, Waterfall, Donut, Area Chart, Matrix and others.
Data Sources
Getting your data into PowerBI is easier than ever before. There are a great many new "out of box" service connectors (github, google analytics, mailchimp, salesforce, visual studio online, and a whole lot more), and even a great On-Prem Data Connector.
- New Simple and categorized Get Data Experience
- New data source support has also been extended to include Zendesk, Intuit Quickbooks Online, AppFigures, GitHub, Twilio, and SweetIQ.
- Direct connection to SQL Server Analysis Services tabular models for data exploration, connecting and refreshing on On-Prem data. (Yes you can EASILY connect your On-Prem data to PowerBI)
- Support for real time dashboards over massive data streams through Azure Stream Analytics ( Great for IoT Solutions! )
- Browser rendered Excel reports in PowerBI
- Easy import of CSV files
Developer Friendly
Every business has their own unique needs for reporting/dashboarding and often need a unique solution. Microsoft has given us the ability to unlock the power of PowerBI by allowing developers to extend PowerBI.
Pricing
More details on the PowerBI Pricing model at the time of General Availability have been published. Notably, PowerBI will have a FREE option will offers plenty of capability for testing, adoption, and learning purposes!
| |
FREE |
$9.99 user / month |
| POWER BI |
POWER BI PRO |
| Data capacity limit |
1 GB/user |
10 GB/user |
| Create, view and share personal dashboards and reports |
X |
X |
| Power BI Designer for content authoring |
X |
X |
| Explore data with natural language* |
X |
X |
| Power BI mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android |
X |
X |
| Content packs for services like Dynamics, Salesforce, and SendGrid |
X |
X |
| Import data and reports from Excel files |
X |
X |
| Data Refresh |
|
|
| Scheduled data refresh |
Daily |
Hourly |
| Support for streaming data |
10K rows/hour |
1M rows/hour |
| Live interactive connectivity to data sources |
|
X |
| Data Connectivity Gateways (Personal and Data Management) |
|
X |
| Collaboration |
|
|
| Share refreshable team dashboards and reports |
|
X |
| Create and publish customized content packs |
|
X |
| Use of Active Directory groups for sharing & managing access control |
|
X |
| Shared data queries through the Data Catalog |
|
X |
Get more Details on PowerBi Pricing here
Lots more where that came from!
This is just a small sample of some of the great new and exciting features that PowerBI offers. Given this, and great pricing model... do yourself a favor and check out PowerBI once it reaches General Availability on July 24th, at: powerbi.microsoft.com