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Announcing RapidMiner 9.7 — Making data science a team sport

June 10, 2020 BI News and Info

Today, we’re excited to announce the next step in RapidMiner’s growth—RapidMiner 9.7. With the launch of 9.7, we’re continuing our work to put people at the center of the AI journey by fostering better collaboration, all while improving the oversight and management that’s critical to creating successful machine learning projects.

Here’s a look at the biggest changes in 9.7.

RapidMiner Server is now RapidMiner AI Hub

As part of the 9.7 launch, we’ve rebranded RapidMiner Server as RapidMiner AI Hub. This new name communicates the AI Hub’s function of connecting machine learning to the people, processes, and systems that make it all work. Integrating all of this through the AI Hub will help tear down the silos that can stymie machine learning projects and help them succeed. You can read more about the name change here.

AI Hub includes a new projects framework

The change in name to AI Hub comes with the addition of a projects framework that allows for unprecedented central collaboration and governance of AI projects.

Projects help teams convert ideas into models easily and iteratively, so they can deliver value for the business. People with different tooling preferences and skillsets can collaborate in a single platform that supports automated, visual, and code-based authoring styles. Everyone involved in machine learning projects can work together in the same place, easing collaboration friction.

Projects offers precise version control

In addition to allowing everyone to work in the same place, projects also delivers a rare combination of agility and traceability by integrating fine-grained version control based on Git standards. This allows the tracking of all changes—including who executed them—which creates clear and distinct model lineages in case you need to backtrack or merge project code. What’s more, “Snapshots” functionality lets you easily roll back to earlier versions of projects, supporting iterative and agile AI development.

Supports large-scale collaboration

To support collaboration at large scale, we’ve introduced enterprise-grade identity & access management to RapidMiner’s products. This includes an enterprise-grade single sign-on experience, creating a seamless experience across the RapidMiner platform. It also includes precision access control that facilitates fine-grained user, group, and role management.

All of these new features make collaboration between coders, RapidMiner Studio users, and RapidMiner Go users even easier. If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of the release, you can check out the What’s New page for all the details.

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RapidMiner

Announcing the deprecation of the Dynamics 365 for Outlook COM add-in

March 25, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Today, Microsoft released an announcement regarding the Future of Outlook integration for Dynamics 365 and Power Apps customers. See the original blog post HERE

The key takeaway:

Deprecation of the Dynamics 365 for Outlook COM add-in for Dynamics 365 Online organizations

Note: We recommend our on-premise customers also take advantage of the benefits of Dynamics 365 App for Outlook and upgrade from the Outlook COM Add-in at the earliest.

When?

The recommendation is to start the migration as soon as possible to the App for Outlook and complete the migration by October 1st, 2020.

Why?

With the many feature additions and enhancements within the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, it has reached a level of maturity and parity that allows for the deprecation of the legacy client, which also aligns to the deprecation of the legacy web client and transition to Unified Interface. Below are some of the benefits of moving to the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook:

Unified Interface. Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is built on the Unified Interface framework, which uses responsive web design principles to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience for any screen size, device, or orientation. Much of Dynamics 365 functionality is now included.
Global search or multi-entity search. Use global search to search for a keyword in multiple entities at the same time. Global search uses the quick find view for the various entities to search for records.
Forms. View and edit forms the same as what you see in the mobile experience.
Dashboards. View and edit dashboards the same as what you see in the mobile experience.
Cross platform. Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is built using the modern Office add-ins, and supports Windows, Mac desktop clients, iOS and Android phones, and Outlook web access.
Deployment. Centralized deployment and distribution by configuring users to the app, makes it easy to onboard users to App for Outlook.

What next?

To begin planning your transition, please take a look at the Dynamics 365 for Outlook playbook HERE.

For additional technical information on the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, take a look at this 10-part blog series HERE.

Thanks for reading!

Aaron Richards

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Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement in the Field

AI Weekly: Announcing our AI and security special issue

February 7, 2020 Big Data

VentureBeat’s second special issue is nigh. Following our first special issue, Power in AI, this next one focuses on AI and security. Each special issue is a package of articles that explores a central topic from a variety of angles, from voices in industry, academia, and our newsroom.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, both AI and cybersecurity are nearly omnipresent in our daily lives at this point, and together they’re of increasing importance as our world becomes more connected, more “intelligent,” and more reliant on online or automated systems. Yet both can seem intractably technical, even for tech-savvy people. Because their significance is pitched against their opaqueness, each has an ominous gravity that only multiplies at the intersection of their Venn diagrams. The easy metaphor is that cybersecurity is a never ending, escalating arms race between good guys and bad guys, and the advent of AI is proverbial nuclear warfare.

Some of that’s true, but the reality is far more illuminating, nuanced, and accessible. There are huge threats posed by cybersecurity that AI technologies may amplify, and so cybersecurity experts need to employ them to protect us — and they are. In this issue, we’ll discuss how the threats are sometimes more sophisticated than ever, but often not. We’ll learn that even as attack and defense systems are more supercharged by technology than ever, the need for human expertise becomes more imperative, not less. And we’ll see that some of the seemingly most onerous threats, like deepfakes and the increasing presence of AI-powered cameras, have practical and political solutions.

Cybersecurity is a battlefield, and AI is creating new fronts in that war, with new weapons and means of defense. But in this special issue, we took a less charged approach, pulling from dozens of interviews with vendors and researchers to understand what’s really going on with AI and security and how we should think about it.

Because after all, even with the added layer of AI technologies, in security there’s nothing new under the sun, or at least very little. It remains an endless cycle of emerging technology that begets both threats and defenses. That’s simultaneously frightening and reassuring.

To get the VentureBeat AI and Security special issue in your inbox on Tuesday morning, February 11, sign up here.

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Announcing: Upgrade your classic workspaces to the new workspace experience public preview is rolling out

November 22, 2019 Self-Service BI

The Power BI new workspace experience has been General Available since April 2019. It offers improved security management, more flexible workspace roles, and new capabilities like a contact list to help you support your teams. Using the new workspace experience also enables several major features like shared and certified datasets and large models, to name a few.

Today, we enabled workspace upgrade for all commercial cloud customers as an opt-in Public Preview. The roll-out may still be proceeding so if you don’t see it just yet don’t worry, it’s coming. For national cloud customers, we’re expecting to enable it in your tenants in early January 2020.

Below you can see how to find the upgrade option in the workspace settings pane if you’re a workspace Admin.

How to prepare for the upgrade

What should I do after upgrading?

You should do several things after you upgrade. It’s best to plan them before you upgrade:

Who can upgrade a workspace and how does it work?

Workspace admins will be able to upgrade workspaces they own. Power BI admins can see which workspaces are classic workspaces by using the workspaces list in the Power BI admin portal. They can then work with workspace admins to upgrade the desired workspaces.

Watch the video below to see the upgrade in action. Scroll forward to 17 minutes and 26 seconds to the workspace upgrade section.

What is the user experience after an upgrade?

For end users, the upgrade keeps things like they were before you upgraded the workspace. The URLs and item identifiers of the workspace, the items it contains, and the app you published from it don’t change. Features like data refresh, subscriptions, and so forth keep working as they did before the upgrade.

Additionally, upgrading your Power BI workspace doesn’t change or remove the Office 365 Group. Any of the Teams, SharePoint Sites, OneNote notebooks, or other things tied to the Office 365 Groups continue to exist and work as they did before.

Your end users will need to refresh their web browsers after the upgrade happens, so you may want to upgrade at off-hours.

There are important differences if the workspace has installed or published content packs, these are described below at a high level, and more extensively in the documentation.

What are the biggest changes to be aware of after upgrade?

Firstly, your workspace in Power BI isn’t tied to the Office 365 Group anymore. That means that if you delete the Office 365 Group, the workspace won’t be deleted. Also, if you delete the workspace, the Office 365 Group won’t be deleted.

The workspace access list and roles assigned to users are updated. You’ll want to review these after upgrade to make sure you understand the changes. The Owners of the Office 365 Group are added as Admins of the workspace. The members of the Office 365 Group are not added individually to the workspace access list. Instead, the Office 365 Group is added with the appropriate workspace role.

In most cases, the Office 365 Group will be given the Member role. However, if your workspace is ‘read-only’ then they’ll be given the Viewer role.

You will want to review the permissions after upgrade section in the documentation to familiarize yourself with the details.

What happens if I’m still using content packs?

The new workspace experience doesn’t support content packs. Instead, use apps and shared datasets to distribute content in the workspace. We recommend removing published or installed content packs from the workspace prior to upgrade.

However, if there are published or installed content packs when you upgrade, the upgrade process attempts to preserve the content. The top thing you should know is that we copy the content so it’s still available to users, but it won’t update any more. Because we copy the content URLs to items in content pack will change so you’ll need to distribute new URL to anyone you shared those items to. There is no way to restore the content pack or the association of content to the content pack after you upgrade. If you are still using content packs read through the documentation which covers what happens in detail.

Can I move my organization entirely off classic workspaces?

The public preview allows upgrading individual workspace. It doesn’t provide tools for bulk upgrade. New Office 365 Groups will continue to be listed as workspaces in Power BI. For organizations wanting to move their workspaces, the documentation offers some suggested approaches for doing so.

Can I go back to a classic workspace after the upgrade?

For 30 days after the upgrade, you can use the go back to classic workspace option to return to an Office 365 Group based workspace. When you do this, some aspects of your classic workspace won’t be restored, like content packs. You’ll want to learn more about going back to a classic workspace since there are a number of cases when you won’t be able to go back.

What is the Viewer role and how can I use it?

The Viewer role allows a user to view all the reports, dashboards, and Excel workbooks in the workspace. The role makes it easier for teams to share with colleagues who need to see all the content in the workspace, but don’t need to edit or add new content.

The users see the workspace in their workspaces list. If you assign the workspace to a Power BI Premium capacity, users with the Viewer role do not need a Power BI Pro license to view the content in the workspace. Some teams may find it easier to just give their colleagues the Viewer role than to publish and keep an app updated.

Users with the Viewer role can export summarized data from reports and datasets they have access to. This is because under the covers they are given the Read permission to the reports and the datasets in the workspace. However, to export summarized data or to Analyze in Excel, you’ll need to give them the Build permission on the datasets you want them to use. If you expect your users will need that, it’s likely easier to publish an app since this will give them Build permission on all the desired dataset, without you managing permission on each dataset manually.

It’s well worth familiarizing yourself with the details of the new workspace roles.

How can I tell the two types of workspaces apart?

In the workspaces list, if you expand the “…” menu, you’ll see the difference in available options. New workspace experiences workspaces show options for Workspace Settings and Workspace Access. If you configured a Workspace OneDrive, you’ll see the Files option too. Classic workspaces show different options including Calendar, Members, Conversations, and a few others.

When you open the workspace’s content list, you’ll see that new workspaces have new options for Access, Settings in the top actions bar.

We’ve tried to keep consistency for the experiences across workspace types, so most users don’t notice there was a change and to minimize retraining costs.

Next Steps

Learn more about upgrading classic workspaces in Power BI

Learn more about the new workspace experience

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Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

Announcing new data protection capabilities in Power BI

November 5, 2019 Self-Service BI

Digital transformation has revolutionized the way organizations operate, improved their productivity, enabled greater collaboration and enhanced business workflows with state-of-the-art technologies like AI. Digital transformation also created new threats of business data leakage as well as new regulations such as the new European Union’s General Data Protection (GDPR) governing how organization should store and protect sensitive business data. More than ever before, data protection is a top of mind for many central IT teams.

Power BI adoption by large enterprises is growing very fast. To reduce the risk for data leakage, up until now some organizations have chosen to block export from Power BI and/or limit user access to sensitive data, at the expense of productivity. Others, have chosen just to rely on their employees following the organization’s data protection guidelines, in order to maintain high productivity. Both options require IT teams to make a compromise between data protection and productivity.

Over the past six months, the Power BI team has worked closely with the Microsoft Information Protection and Cloud App Security teams to provide a solution that will enable Power BI customers to have their data protected, while maintaining high productivity.

It is now possible to:

Classify and label sensitive Power BI data using the familiar Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels used in Office.
Enforce governance policies even when Power BI content is exported to Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF, to help ensure data is protected even when it leaves Power BI.
Monitor and protect user activity on sensitive data in real time with alerts, session monitoring, and risk remediation using Microsoft Cloud App Security.
Empower security administrators who use data protection reports and security investigation capabilities with Microsoft Cloud App Security to enhance organizational oversight.

Sensitivity labels in Power BI

A sensitivity label is a tag that you can apply on Power BI datasets, reports, dashboards and dataflows, it is:

Customizable to the organizations needs – By defining sensitivity labels, organizations can create categories for different levels of sensitive content, such as Personal, Public, General, Confidential, and Highly Confidential.
Easily visible – It’s easy for content creators to apply sensitive labels as part of the content creation flow. Once the label has been applied any consumer that interacts with the content can see the content sensitivity.
Persistent – after a sensitivity label has been applied to content in Power BI, it persist applying both the label and protection when it is exported to: Excel, PowerPoint and PDF.

The beauty of this new capability is that these are the same sensitivity labels often used by organizations to classify, label and protect Office 365 files such as Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook emails.

Once a sensitivity label is applied to a report, Power BI extends applicable protection policies to that report data when it is exported from Power BI to Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.

For example, if the sensitivity label on a report has a file protection policy, when data is exported from this report to an Excel file, authorized users will be able to view the file, whereas the file is protected against access by unauthorized users.

Authorized users will be able to open the file and see the sensitivity label applied to the Power BI report:

Unauthorized users will not be able to open the file:

Sensitivity labels applied on reports and dashboards are also visible when viewing reports and dashboards in the Power BI mobile app (IOS and Android)

Licenses are required to apply and view sensitivity labels in Power BI and in Office apps.

Learn about data protection in Power BI

How to enable sensitivity labels in Power BI

Real-time controls and monitoring with Microsoft Cloud App Security

Microsoft Cloud App Security is one of the world’s leading cloud access security brokers used to secure the use of cloud apps. It enables organizations to monitor and control, in real time, risky Power BI sessions such as user access from unmanaged devices. Security administrators can define policies to control user actions, such as downloading reports with sensitive information.

For example, if a user connects to Power BI from an unmanaged device, the session can be monitored by Microsoft Cloud App Security’s real-time controls, and risky actions, such as downloading data that has the “Highly Confidential” sensitivity label applied to it, can be blocked in real time.

Additionally, with Microsoft Cloud App Security, administrators have real-time visibility and control over Power BI user activities concerning data that has sensitivity labels. This visibility and control include security alerts for Power BI service activities such as mass or suspicious report sharing (preview), etc.

Microsoft Cloud App Security licenses are required for these capabilities.

Coming soon: New protection metrics report for admins in Power BI admin portal

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Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

Announcing new contact lists for reports and dashboards in the Power BI service

October 26, 2019 Self-Service BI

When using data in reports and dashboards, end users frequently need to ask authors and experts questions, raise issues about the data they see, or seek confirmation that conclusions are sound. All too often, it’s unclear who to ask these questions or the answers don’t come quick enough. The new contact list makes it easy to support end users by providing a list of contacts that can include multiple users or groups for reports and dashboards in the Power BI service. When used with the New Look for the Power BI service, end users can quickly find and contact someone to make timely data driven decisions.

The contact lists for reports and dashboards described in this post have already rolled out to the Power BI service.

How to configure a contact list for reports or dashboards

When you publish a report and or create a dashboard, in the settings pane for the item you’ll now see a Contact box. Below we’ll show the UI experience for reports, but it works the same for dashboards.

You can use the content list for the workspace and open the settings pane. It’s under the Gear icon —> Settings

Announcing new contact lists for reports and dashboards in the Power BI service — Screenshot showing the contact setting for reports available in the report’s settings pane.

The default contact for the item is the person who created it.

You can customize the contact it in several ways. You can replace the initial author with another person. If your author changes job roles, you can now ensure the current author is listed. You can add more people. Often, reports are supported by multiple authors, all of them can be added to contact list. This helps end users because the contact is up to date and if you provide multiple people, there’s always someone around to answer question even if the primary author is on vacation.

Additionally, you can put Office 365 Groups, distribution groups, and email enabled security groups in the contact list. This is great for teams who manage many reports and dashboards. It helps them centralize help requests, can give visibility on which items get the most help requests so they can be improved, and fosters a more responsive and faster data culture.

Lastly, you can remove the contact from the item entirely. When you do, the workspace’s contact information is used instead. The new workspace experience provides a workspace level contact list that allows the same customization as the item contact list. For classic workspaces, the Office 365 Group is used. This means that if you want to manage contact information centrally for your entire workspace you can, just by removing the item specific contact.

How do end users use the contact list

For users who are using the New Look for the Power BI Service, the item information card shows the contact information.

When the user clicks the contact information, an email is created with the contact email addresses. It’s perfect for when the data just doesn’t seem right, and the end user needs to quickly ask the right people for help. It’s also a great way to send feedback to the authors to help improve reports and dashboards.

Additionally, those on the contact list for an item get emails related to that item. For example, when a user requests access to the item, everyone in the contact list is notified. Lastly, we’ve started to display the contact list on our error dialog in some cases where the author can resolve the issue. Altogether, this will speed up how quickly end users can get help using data to make more effective and timely decisions.

The item level contact list doesn’t get pushed into apps when they are published. The new app navigation experience provides a support URL you configure to help manage feedback from large number of app users.

As always, we’re eager to hear your feedback on how the new contact list feature. Drop a comment below or make feature suggestions on our User Voice page.

Next steps

Read the contact list documentation

Learn about New Look for the Power BI service

Learn about the New workspace experience

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Announcing Automated Machine learning in Power BI general availability

October 24, 2019 Self-Service BI

Earlier this year, we introduced Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) in Power BI as Public Preview. Now, we’re happy to announce that AutoML in Power BI is generally available in all public cloud regions where Power BI Premium and Embedded is available.

Using AutoML in Power BI, business analysts without a strong background in machine learning can build ML models to solve business problems that once required data scientists. Most of the data science behind the creation of the ML models is automated by Power BI, while giving visibility into the process used to create your ML model to provide you with full insight. Since AutoML targets analysts who may not have prior experience building ML models, we have made a significant investment in adding automatic guardrails such as class balancing, training-test data split, cross-validation, missing value imputation, and high cardinality feature detection to ensure that the model produced has good quality.

Macaw, a Dutch full-service digital company, deployed automated machine learning in Power BI to quickly ingest sales data and train, validate, and invoke machine learning models directly in Power BI. Dave Ruijter, Principal Consultant Data and AI at Macaw, shared that “The automated functionality within Power BI helps us scale how we infuse our solutions with AI capabilities. Now Macaw Power BI analysts can include machine learning in their solutions without involving a data scientist.” One of their customers, Mitch van Deursen, the Co-owner and Chief Information Officer at Shoeby says, “We now get answers to key business questions within five days, where normally modelling would take months. “ Read about their story here.

With the Public Preview release, AutoML in Power BI enabled users to:

Train a machine learning model to perform Binary Prediction, General Classification, and Regression
View the model training report
Apply the ML model to their data, and view predictions and explanations

Since then, we have been improving and adding new capabilities to AutoML in Power BI.

Binary prediction support for non-Boolean outcomes

Earlier, AutoML expected the outcome field for a binary prediction model to be a Boolean value. We now also support non-Boolean values in the outcome field. In the wizard, you can directly choose the target outcome that you’re most interested in, saving you the preprocessing steps of converting it to Boolean.

Improved Feature Recommendation

We improved the statistical methods that suggest input fields that can be used for training the ML model. Auto ML now analyzes a sample of the selected entity, recommends fields, and shows the reasons for fields that are not recommended. If a certain field has too many distinct values or only one value, or low or high correlation with the output field, it would not be recommended.

Controlling training time

AutoML now allows you to control the time for training a model.

You can choose to decrease the training time to see quick results or increase the amount of time spent in training to get the best model. The former is useful when you are building a POC or for making sure that you have selected the right fields.

Improved training reports

Training reports have been improved to make them more readable. Additionally, reports are now generated two times faster.

Binary prediction reports now include a Cost-Benefit analysis tool. Given an estimated unit cost of targeting and a unit benefit from achieving a target outcome, it helps you identify the subset of the population that should be targeted to yield the highest profit.

Explainable AI

AutoML emphasizes the explainability of predictions to provide visibility into fields that are most important. It provides top predictors during training as well as explanations for each prediction that the ML model produces during scoring.

The Top Predictors section has been improved to show comprehensible feature breakdown so that you can easily validate that the model aligns with your business insights about the outcome field. In the house price prediction example below, the feature breakdown chart for “sqft_living”(on the right) shows that higher “sqft_living” values have higher house prices.

In addition to this, we have added support for text features in top predictors.

Explanations for predictions are now surfaced as a separate entity to make them easily accessible and readable. In order to make the model predictions interpretable, we show the contribution of every feature towards the prediction, and these contributions add up to the predicted value.

In the house price prediction example below, you can see that some features have a positive influence (in green), and other features have a negative influence (in red). Adding these contributions to a base value (average value of the house price in the training data in this case), gives you the predicted house price of $ 379,738, thus allowing you to easily explain these model predictions.

Using this explanations entity you can quickly build reports explaining model predictions. Automatically generated explanation reports will be available shortly.

Get started building you own ML Models

Here is a step-by-step tutorial that shows how to build your machine learning model using Auto ML. To learn more, refer to the documentation. If you have any questions or would like to get in touch with us about your use cases, pain points, please reach out to automlpowerbi@microsoft.com. We’d love to hear about your experiences, feedback, and ideas on how you’d like to use Auto ML in Power BI.

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Announcing The 2019 Power BI User Group Global Hackathon Champions!

October 12, 2019 Self-Service BI

It is with great pleasure that the Power BI User Group announced the 2019 Power BI User Group Global Hackathon winning team as…

Team Hydro-Québec of the Montreal Power BI User Group! Congratulations to our Power BI User Group World Champs!

Members of Team Hydro-Québec:

William Martin (Team Captain)
Maxime Tremblay
Francis Quenneville
France Cano

The Global Hackathon Judging Committee – consisting of Microsoft Product Team members Amanda Cofsky, Tessa Hurr, Kelly Kaye, and Will Thompson and 2018 Global Hackathon Winning Denmark Power BI User Group Leaders Erik Svensen and Just Thorning Blindbæk – remarked that the Team’s solution was visually very compelling, with a well-presented story. Great, easy to follow navigation around the report and beautiful drillthroughs. View Team Hydro-Québec’s winning dashboard and video overview to learn more!

The global hackathon has provided our worldwide Power BI User Group community with a fun and competitive opportunity to use Power BI to entertain, educate, and inspire people and facilitate positive change through the data stories that are visualized. Starting with local competitions, these teams were selected as the top teams in their local Power BI User Groups hackathon challenges. Teams were instructed to use data sets from public data sources only, and solutions could be built with either Desktop, Excel, Power BI Service, Embedded, or with any combination of these options.

Review all the final solutions here: Power BI Exchange
Local Finalists Include:

Thank you to all the competing teams, Power BI User Group Leaders, Judging Committee and community of voters for participating and making this challenge possible! Stay tuned for more insights about this Team’s hackathon adventure, as Team Hyrdo-Québec won passes to a Power Platform World Tour location of their choice.

While the Canadian stops may have passes, there are still opportunities to engage with experts and great users like these at upcoming Power Platform World Tour locations happening around the world during the next 3 months:

Don’t miss your chance to connect, engage and learn from your fellow Power BI community members at an upcoming event near you. Get engaged and join your local Power BI User Group community for FREE today!

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Announcing Power BI updates at the Microsoft Business Applications October Virtual Launch Event

October 5, 2019 Self-Service BI

The Microsoft business applications virtual launch event is almost here! You don’t want to miss this opportunity to get a first-hand look at the new innovations we’re rolling out for Power BI. Register today for this free event, and then tune in to the live stream on October 10, 2019 from 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM Pacific Time.

You’ll get an in-depth look at the new capabilities announced in the 2019 release wave 2 across Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform. James Phillips, Corporate Vice President of the Business Applications Group, and other Microsoft experts will guide you through the new updates, answer common customer questions, and discuss what these releases mean for your business.

Come learn how these new Power BI features will help you:

Build a data culture for your organization by empowering everyone with intuitive experiences, a unified BI platform, big analytics, and pervasive artificial intelligence.
Discover hidden actionable insights in data with new artificial intelligence capabilities that require no code.
Manage growing data volume and complexity with petabyte-scale analytics that make Power BI and Microsoft Azure an unmatched combination.
Benefit from the investments we’re making in simple, intuitive experiences that are deeply integrated with Microsoft Office 365 to provide self-service analytics for everyone.
Create a global, governed, scalable, secure, and unified BI platform that meets the needs of both self-service and centralized BI.

With updates, insights, and demonstrations directly from the experts, you’ll better understand how to leverage these new technologies as part of your organization’s digital transformation initiatives.

Onboard the new capabilities in Power BI with confidence – prepare for the updates, read the release plan, and then tune in on October 10.

Come unlock what’s next for your business, register today!

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Announcing custom branding for your organization

August 21, 2019 Self-Service BI

To establish data-driven cultures, organizations around the world leverage Power BI for their large-scale BI deployments. Empowering tens of thousands of people with reliable data is no easy feat. IT departments and BI teams bear the responsibility of delivering a solution where people feel safe and confident exploring insights. Consistent branding and corporate representation earn the trust of the people in your organization using Power BI.

Today, I am thrilled to announce the release of custom branding for the Power BI service. Now you can change the look and feel of the Power BI service to match your corporate theme with just a few clicks!

Custom branding lets you change the theme color that appears in the top navigation bar, add your company logo, and bring your default landing page to life by adding a cover image. Sound exciting? Read on for a walkthrough. Or, head over to the admin portal to try it out for yourself.

Note: We are starting to roll out the feature to tenants this week. It should be enabled worldwide by August 27, 2019.

Branding your Power BI service

To get started, open the Power BI admin portal, and select the Custom branding tab in the left navigation.

On this page, you can configure the following elements:

Logo: Upload a logo for your organization. The logo will appear in the top left of the navigation bar that appears on every page. The image must be under 10 KB and least 200 x 30 pixels in size.
Cover image: Upload a cover image that gets featured on top of Home. The image must be under 1 MB and ideally 1920 x 160 pixels in size. We’ve also added an option for you to crop your cover image within the service.
Theme color: Select a color to use for the background of the top navigation bar that appears on every page. By default, the theme color is set to Power BI’s original color. We recommend that you choose something that complements your logo or resembles other portals (e.g. other Office 365 sites) within your organization.

Once you have configured your branding elements, you can see a quick preview of how this will look on Home by selecting the Preview button. It’s always better to get a glimpse of your artwork before deploying it to thousands of people!

Here’s an example of organizational branding being configured for Contoso:

Announcing custom branding for your organization

And that’s it! Once you’re happy with your custom branding configuration, select Publish. Everyone in your organization will see the new Power BI service branding right away. Refresh your browser to see it in action.

Best practices

When choosing a Logo, we recommend using an PNG file type wherever possible so that your logo will have a high-resolution appearance on all screens and at all zoom levels.

When choosing a Theme color for the top navigation, choose a color that has a high contrast ratio with the logo you picked. The recommended contrast ratio between logo and theme color is 4.5:1.

When choosing a Cover image, put on your Picasso hat and get creative! We recommend that you choose something that complements the theme color you chose and provides a welcoming feel. To ensure the cover image scales to various resolutions and screen sizes, we recommend you choose an image that has a large width, 2000 pixels or higher, and a fixed height of 160 pixels.

FAQ

Can I configure the theme of the left navigation?

No, the left navigation can’t be configured. As soon as you apply your corporate branding, the left navigation will be light-themed by default. You will notice that the accent color of the “French fry” matches your theme color.

Will it work with the new look?

Yes, custom branding will be supported in the old and new look. It should not impact any feature or functionality.

How do I revert to the default Power BI colors?

There’s an option to remove custom branding on the custom branding page in the admin portal. Select that and publish to reset your Power BI service to the default colors.

How does this work with B2B?

One of the added benefits of having your own custom branding for your organization is that it will help you quickly distinguish the tenant you are viewing the report in for B2B scenarios. Please note that we will not be supporting branding for B2B users in sovereign clouds for the initial release.

Next steps

Try out the feature! Head on over to the admin portal and start to plan out how you want to customize the Power BI service to match your corporate brand. You can use the Preview functionality to try out various configurations and choose the best one
We are also planning on bringing this functionality to Power BI mobile – hang tight and keep an eye out on the blogs in the upcoming weeks
Have comments? Want to share your cool branding? We’d love to see it! Please leave comments below or in the community forums
Have ideas for where we should take the feature? Create new ideas or vote on existing ones in UserVoice

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