As
the Power BI Service and Power Platform Administrator at Van Lanschot Kempen I
often run into things related to governance and
administration of our Power Platform environments. I plan on doing more of
these posts, including, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Workspace upgrade to V2
- Refresh a dataset with
Powershell (and a service principal)
- Power BI Premium monitoring
- Workspace and Gateway
administration
- Tenant settings
- Power Platform environments
If you're interested
in any of these or other related topics, please let me know, below in the
comments or on Twitter!
Power BI Visuals
Now
on to the topic of this post: out-of-the-box, custom &
organizational visuals. The main topic of this post
will be organizational visuals, but let's start basic and begin with the
regular visuals. Because there are quite some out-of-the-box visuals in Power
BI, that have a pretty diverse use case.
Next to all the
basic visuals there are also quite some custom visuals in the marketplace, 253 at the time of writing, to be exact.
When you want to use
custom visuals in Power BI, please take the following points into
consideration:
- Make sure you trust the
author and the source of any custom visual, it can contain code with
security or privacy risks.
- Do you know what data is send
over the internet? And where is your data send to?
When to use what visual?
But
how do I choose between all these visuals? When do I prefer a line chart over a
table visual or a pie chart? Well, the answer to the last one is simple: don't
use pie charts. Like never. Even Wikipedia mentions many experts recommend
avoiding them, among which Stephen Few.
Now we're clear on
that, let's look at a few examples of how to choose the best chart/visual for
your data:
Organizational visuals
At Van Lanschot
Kempen, in the end of last year we introduced the use of Organizational
visuals. This allowed us to deploy and manage Power BI visuals inside our
organization. The mean reason for us for doing this was to block all, except
the certified custom visuals, mainly because:
- The Admin can control which
custom visuals are available in the organization
- Better security as those
visuals will only be allowed for organizational members that are logged in
- No need to share visual files
(when using private visuals)
- Everyone uses the same visual
version (controlled by the Admin)
Tenant settings
In
the Power BI Admin portal there are 2 Tenant settings that you can use to
adjust the use of custom visuals to the needs of your organization. Because by default all members of an organization can add and use all
Power BI visuals including imported private files.
If you think these
settings were previously called different, that's correct. I believe they
renamed them last week, this were the old names for the settings:
The 2 settings are
used as follows:
- Allow visuals created using the Power BI SDK
Pretty straight forward: allow or disallow the use of custom visuals, either
for everyone or (not) for specific security groups
- Add and use certified visuals only (block uncertified)
If the first setting is enabled, you can either enable or disable this setting.
Please be
aware that when you enable this (last) setting, all uncertified visuals in
current reports will be blocked (in the service). Enabling the visual through
the Organizational Store again doesn't help, because in that case the visual
uses another ID, as you will see later in this post.
In addition
to blocking the use of certain visuals in the Service, Power BI Desktop
supports using a Group Policy to apply
these 2 settings also locally:
- EnableCustomVisuals
- EnableUncertifiedVisuals
You can read
how to exactly enable this setting in the PowerBI visuals settings of the Admin Portal documentation.
Organizational visual administration
The
organizational visuals can be managed from the Admin Portal.
An important note:
organizational visuals are visuals that are handpicked and managed by the
admin. None of the Tenant settings above are applied to the organizational
store. Disabling the visuals in the organizational store must be done manually
by the admin in the Admin Portal.
These are
the organizational visuals we currently have deployed in our tenant:
As you see
we also have the Hierarchy Slicer (by Jan Pieter Posthuma), because at the time
we implemented that visual into the organizational store, it wasn't certified
yet (it was certified on January 7, 2020). We still have to do an impact
analysis to see if we can switch back to the regular (certified) visual,
because then it will update itself again via the regular visuals store and can
also be exported to Power Point for example.
Adding organizational visuals
In the Power BI
Admin Portal you can Add an organizational
visual in the Organizational visuals section.
You can provide the
following properties for a visual:
- .pbiviz file
(mandatory): you
can download this file from AppSource.
- Name: You can give it any name
you want, just be aware this name is not used as the name of your visual
in Power BI Desktop, only in the My organization tab in Power BI Desktop
- Icon: Again, this is only the
icon displayed on the My organization tab in Power BI Desktop, the icon in the visualizations pane is still managed by
the .pbiviz file.
- Description: duh :-)
- Access: you have the possibility to
disable a visual currently deployed to the organizational store.
For
more information on adding an organization visual please visit Add a new custom visual.
Using Organizational Visuals
As I
mentioned earlier, when you are using organizational visuals they are different
from the "regular" visual with the same name. They are managed in the
Admin Portal and have a different ID from their regular counterpart. You can
check this in Power BI Desktop if you right-click a visual in the
visualizations pane.
Organizational
visual
Regular
visual, tied to AppSource
Now when I
publish this report to the service I will see the following error on my report:
Recap and limitations
There are quite some
Power BI visuals available for you to use: be it out-of-the-box, custom or
organizational visuals. However, you can have good reasons not to open up the
world for the Power BI report authors, so you start with taking a look at the Tenant settings.
Don't forget to plan
for updating the used organizational visuals and communicating to the
organization you're limiting the use of certain visuals for the end users.
Also, you might want
to take a look at a few important limitations mentioned in the documentation, of which I'd like to highlight the
following:
- If a custom visual is deleted
from the repository, any existing reports that use the deleted visual will
stop rendering. Deletion operation from the repository isn't
reversible. To
temporarily disable a custom visual, use the "Disable" feature.
- Organizational
Power BI visuals are private visuals imported from the organization
repository. As any private visual they can't be exported
to PowerPoint or displayed in emails received when a
user subscribes to
report pages. Only certified Power BI visuals imported directly from the marketplace
supports these features.
Resources and
further reading:
