Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Microsoft Build - Data Announcements Summary

During Build we heard a lot of announcements around data, analytics and AI. Let me give you my summary and take on the things I heard and saw!

In general, AI is going to exist in more and more places in our daily work. Earlier, Copilot was already announced in Power Apps and Power Automate, Outlook and Office products, but also GitHub. I wouldn’t be surprised if it will be embedded in almost every part of our daily work in the future, at least to some extend.

These were my favorite announcements:
  • Microsoft Fabric delivers an integrated and simplified experience for all analytics workloads
  • Data Activator is a new detection system for alerting and taking actions (and part of Fabric)
  • Git Integration: delivered as part of the new Fabric workloads
  • Power BI Desktop Developer Mode will deliver a better experience for developers with a new Power BI Project file-type (PBIP)
Let's dive into a little bit more details about the above topics.

Microsoft Fabric

Fabric promises to offer end to end analytics from the data lake to the business user, covering the following pillars:
  • Complete Analytics Platform
  • Lake-Centric and Open
  • Empower Every Business User
  • AI Powered
Fabric covers the complete spectrum of services including data movement, data lake, data engineering, data integration and data science, real time analytics, and business intelligence.



Fabric makes life simpler for customers with its unified and comprehensive platform. Fabric architecture is based on Software as a Service (SaaS) foundation instead of the traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS), to take simplicity and integration to the next level.
This SaaS experience makes sure that all the data and services used within Fabric are pre-wired together and share the same user experience, much as with Office today. 

But of course, Microsoft Fabric was not the only announcement at Build.


Power BI Desktop Developer Mode

Power BI Desktop Developer Mode is here, at least it will be very soon ! In a nutshell, "Developer Mode" enables you to save a Power BI Desktop file into a Power BI Project (PBIP) and operate on the artifacts stored as a folder in your file system.
Power BI Desktop is expanding to serve a better experience for developers, with capabilities like:
  • Source Control for version history and diffs
  • CI/CD for e.g. Pull Requests
  • Text editor support

Developer Mode also ties into the next point: Git integration in the service!

Git Integration

The long-awaited source control integration!
Next to Developer Mode in Desktop and an easier and better way to merge changes into source control, Microsoft has also started working on source control integration on the workspace level.
Be aware that this is a Premium feature, so only workspaces with a Power BI Premium capacity license can connect to source control.

Data Activator

This is actually a new name we haven't heard that much about.
"It will help customers respond to changes in their data instantly by setting up a system of detection that automatically alerts the team with the right context to take action."
 It looks like a low code/no-code way to take actions on your data. It's only in private preview at the moment, so we'll have to wait a bit to get more info on this. In the meanwhile, you can read the announcement blog.


Conclusion

There's a lot of exciting news shared during Microsoft Build!

Also be mindful that until July 1st, Fabric is disabled by default. After that date, it will be enabled by default, so you (as an admin) have some time to prepare your users or only give a small group of people access to Fabric for example. Thank you Microsoft for listening to the community! You can also start a free 60 day trial: aka.ms/Try-Fabric.
A tenant admin can enable Fabric workloads manually by switching the tenant setting to on.
Taken from the Power BI blog


If you want a complete (textual) overview of all announcements during Build, have a look at the Build Book of News 2023.

If you want to know more details about Microsoft Fabric and the other announcements, or if you want to watch the recordings of other sessions, I suggest starting with the below sessions to get an overview.
A few important sessions to start with:
Blog posts:

After hearing all this exciting news, I'll dive into more details on separate blogs on the above topics.












Thursday, May 11, 2023

Microsoft Build Is Around The Corner

 I think I already shared it earlier, but in case you missed it:



In just under 2 weeks, Microsoft Build (in-person and online conference) is happening with a lot of exciting Power BI and data related updates. You should definitely watch it, either live or the recordings afterwards! It starts at Tuesday, May 23rd, 6PM CEST.

More info and registration: build.microsoft.com


A few important sessions to start with:


I will also share an update shortly after Build to summarize the news and give my feedback on it, so stay tuned!

Friday, April 7, 2023

MVP Global Summit 2023 here we come!

Hey there, fellow Power BI, Power Platform and tech enthusiasts! 

I'm excited to share with you that I'll be attending the MVP summit on April 18-20 for the first time in-person as an MVP. It's been a long time since there was an in-person MVP Summit, so I'm looking forward to the experience!



For those of you who may not be familiar with the MVP program, it stands for Most Valuable Professional. It's a program run by Microsoft, celebrating 30 years this year, that recognizes exceptional technical community leaders who share their passion, expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others.


Being selected as an MVP is a great honor, and I'm humbled to be part of such a fantastic community. The MVP summit is an annual event where MVPs from around the world gather to meet with Microsoft product teams, provide feedback on upcoming products, and share ideas and best practices.


This year's summit will be a hybrid event, meaning that some attendees will be joining virtually, while others will be attending in person. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to attend in person and to meet with other MVPs and members of the (Power BI) product team face-to-face!


As a first-time attendee, I'm not entirely sure what to expect, but I'm eager to learn, network, and share my experiences with others. I'm also excited to hear from the product teams about what's coming next in the world of Microsoft products.


I also want to thank everyone supporting me in my journey, my family, readers of my blog, attendees at conferences and also my employer Powerdobs B.V..


Overall, I'm thrilled to be attending the MVP summit and grateful for the opportunity to connect with others in the tech community. I'll be sure to share my experiences with you all once the event is over, so stay tuned!

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Power BI 2022 In Review: My Favourite Features

Last night we had a work meeting at Powerdobs, with a few presentations about business updates, new joiners in the coming months and Power BI projects. I had the pleasure of closing the evening with a presentation on Power BI.


So I decided to do a presentation on my favourite additions to Power BI over the past year. But instead of doing a regular PowerPoint presentation, I decided to do an all-Power-BI presentation. It was very well received and I was encouraged to share it here!
Without further ado, here is the report: 😀    



In future posts I will dig into the details of this report and let you know how I created it.
I'll also explain why I did (not) include certain features.

For writing this post I was inspired by Kasper's Power BI year 2022 in review and Marco's What happened in the DAX world in 2022.

Let me know what you think, any comments/additions/improvements are welcome!
Do you think I missed features in this review from the last year?