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Announcing Plant-Based Machine Learning

April 5, 2021 BI News and Info

Around this time last year, we announced that we’d expanded our AI and ML capabilities to pets, truly making machine learning paw-ssible for anyone, regardless of whether you’re human or not.

And while we were proud of that effort, some of us wondered if we could go further. There are, after all, other groups of living creatures on this planet. Although we initially considered an expansion into the fungal kingdom, early experiments only resulted in a lot of moldy circuit boards.

But we didn’t let that stop us! We kept working at it, and this year, we’re excited to continue expanding the reach of AI and ML by providing members of the plant kingdom with the ability to run their own machine learning models, using the cloud-based infrastructure of RapidMiner Go. We were so pleased with how much we’ve expanded machine learning beyond humans that we went so far as to revise our understanding of our mission statement:

Our new toolset is based on a proprietary, state-of-the-art plant/computer interface called Lexical-Epicotyl Access for Plants and Herbs (LEAPH) that our green friends can use to access the Internet to find data and then use RapidMiner Go to build and train models.

Let’s take a look at a few of the plants that we worked with during prototyping to give you a sense of the kinds of models that plants might be interested in building and how they can use this technology to have a positive impact on our world.

Potato (Solanum tuberosum)

Potatoes get a bad rap—carbophobes hate them, they’re not infrequently forgotten in a bottom drawer where they turn into brown slush, and they’re even the butt of internet jokes, comparing them to crummy cameras and computers.

But with LEAPH, they can fight back against their haters! Using RapidMiner Go, our resident potato plants were able to build a model that could detect negative sentiment about potatoes on various websites and forums. Their next step is to build a model that can respond to try and discourage people from saying things like photos have “potato quality”.

So if you see anyone complaining about language that’s disparaging to potatoes online, you’ve probably run into the first potato-built sentiment analysis and influencer bot.

Avocado (Persea americana)

Avocados are superstars of the produce aisle—high in healthy fats, great on toast, and popular at parties in the form of guacamole.

But avocados have their problems, too. No avocado wants to be purchased only to be taken home and tossed in the trash when its all-too-short eating window comes and goes without anyone taking notice. This is especially concerning to the avocados since their unpredictable ripening times drive up costs for end consumers, potentially impacting their popularity and thus the number of avocados grown each year.

With our LEAPH interface, a grove of avocado trees was able to model the development of their fruits—including subjective measures like “how brown under the skin are they” and “do they have any of those weird thread things” that’s inaccessible to us humans on the outside—and try to create a model that lets people know when the avocados are ready to be eaten.

Unfortunately, initial testing didn’t result in a model that was able to accurately predict when an avocado was ripe with better than chance accuracy. However, the avocado trees are hopeful that they’ll eventually crack their own code, providing more predictability about their ripeness, and in turn, driving down costs so that restaurants can stop charging extra for guac.

Kale (Brassica oleracea)

Kale has exploded in popularity in the last decade or so, and we have no idea why—and neither does kale! With LEAPH and RapidMiner Go, kale was able to plumb the Internet to look for evidence and chart its rise to health-food hero. Although celebrity endorsements seem to have played a role, the main driver is that people love to talk about how health they are on social media. Since eating kale is seen as a key part of a healthy lifestyle, more social media has driven more kale sales.

And the kale ain’t complainin’!

Wrapping Up

These are just a few examples of the kinds of impacts that RapidMiner can have when it puts the power of AI and ML in anyone’s hands—even plants. We’re excited to see what other plants come up with as we roll out our LEAPH interfaces in the coming weeks.

Our new plant-based options are sure to rock the machine learning world to its roots, as is our new slogan: RapidMiner Go: literally so easy a potato can do it.

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AI Weekly: Announcing our ‘AI and the future of health care’ special issue

January 30, 2021 Big Data

Artificial intelligence and health care both deal heavily with issues of complexity, efficacy, and societal impact. All of that is multiplied when the two intersect. As health care providers and vendors work to use AI and data to improve patient care, health outcomes, medical research, and more, they face what are now standard AI challenges. Data is difficult and messy. Machine learning models struggle with bias and accuracy. And ethical challenges abound. But there’s a heightened need to solve these problems when they’re couched within the daily life-and-death context of health care.

Then, in the midst of the AI’s growth in health care, the pandemic hit, challenging old ways of doing things and pushing systems to their breaking points. In our upcoming special issue, “AI and the future of health care,” we examine how providers and vendors are tackling the challenges of this extraordinary time.

The biggest hurdle has to do with data. Health care produces massive amounts of data, from electronic health records (EHR) to imaging to information on hospital bed capacity. There’s enormous promise in using that data to create AI models that can improve care and even help cure diseases, but there are barriers to that progress. Privacy concerns top the list, but worldwide health care data also needs standardization. There are still too many errors in this data, and the medical community must address persisting biases before they become even more entrenched.

When humans rely on AI to help them make clinical decisions like injury or disease diagnoses, they also have to be aware of their own biases. Because bias exists in the data AI models are built upon, practitioners have to be careful not to fall into the trap of automation bias, relying too much on model output to make decisions. It’s a delicate balance with profound impacts on human health and life.

The pandemic has also challenged the practical day-to-day functions of health care systems. As COVID-19 cases threaten to overwhelm hospitals and patients and doctors risk infection during in-person visits, providers are figuring out how to deliver patient care remotely. With more doctors shifting to telemedicine, chatbots and other tools are helping relieve some of the burden and allowing patients to access care from the safety of their own homes.

For particularly vulnerable populations, like senior citizens, remote care may be necessary, especially if they’re in locked-down residential facilities or can’t easily get to their doctor. The technologies involved in monitoring such patients include wearables that track vitals and even special wireless tech that offers no-touch, personalized biometric tracking.

These are sea changes in health care, and because of the pandemic, they’re coming faster than anyone expected. But a certain optimism persists — a sense that despite unprecedented challenges to the medical field, careful and responsible use of AI can enable permanent, positive changes in the health care system. The astonishing speed with which researchers developed a working COVID-19 vaccine offers ample evidence of the way necessity spurs medical innovation. The best of the technologies, tools, and techniques that health care providers are employing now could soon become standard and lead to more democratized, less expensive, and overall better health care.

You can get this special issue delivered straight to your inbox next week by signing up here.

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AI Weekly: Announcing our ‘Automation and jobs in the new normal’ special issue

August 16, 2020 Big Data

Aside from staying alive and healthy, the biggest concern most people have during the pandemic is the future of their jobs. Unemployment in the U.S. has skyrocketed, from 5.8 million in February 2020 to 16.3 million in July 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s not only the lost jobs that are reshaping work in the wake of COVID-19; the nature of many of the remaining jobs has changed, as remote work becomes the norm. And in the midst of it all, automation has become potentially a threat to some workers and a salvation to others.

In our upcoming special issue, titled “Automation and jobs in the new normal,” we examine this tension and explore the good, bad, and unknown of how automation could affect jobs in the immediate and near future.

Prevailing wisdom says that the wave of new AI-powered automation will follow the same pattern as other technological leaps: They’ll kill off some jobs but create new (and potentially better) ones. But it’s unclear whether that will hold true this time around. Complicating matters is that at a time when workplace safety has to do with limiting the spread of a deadly virus, automation can play a role in reducing the number of people who are working shoulder-to-shoulder — keeping workers safe, but also eliminating jobs.

We’ll look at the sorts of jobs that automation may create, which ones it could eliminate, and how it may reshape certain fields. The shipping industry is not a field that many people think of as ripe for automation, but it’s one where autonomous ships and remote pilots could grow in importance. Another seemingly unlikely target is the meatpacking industry, which turns out to be a hotbed of COVID-19 spread and might need automation both to keep workers safe and to keep the business operational. Meanwhile, as millions of workers abandon their office buildings and begin to work from home, there’s a growing possibility of teleoperators who can remotely support all manner of “autonomous” machines or robots, from simple maintenance to taking manual control when the need arises.

Even as automation creates exciting new opportunities, it’s important to bear in mind that those opportunities will not be distributed equally. Some jobs are more vulnerable to automation than others, and uneven access to reskilling and other crucial factors will mean that some workers will be left behind.

The wave of robotics and automation was already coming, thanks in part to developments in AI technologies like computer vision and machine learning. But the pandemic accelerated the need for some of these new technologies — and also complicated matters by creating high unemployment, radically altered workplaces, and the need for more automation-based safety measures at work.

The new normal has yet to arrive — we’re in a sort of terrible “abnormal” limbo — but when the pandemic subsides, automation will have played a large role in reshaping work around the world.

You can get the special issue delivered straight to your inbox next week by signing up here.

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Announcing the Women in AI Awards winners

July 19, 2020 Big Data

Watch all the Transform 2020 sessions on-demand right here.

We’re thrilled to announce the winners of the second annual Women in AI Awards.

The Women in AI Awards are part of VentureBeat’s continuing commitment to diversity in AI. With that commitment in mind, VentureBeat kicked off Day 1 of Transform 2020 with the Women in AI Breakfast and Day 2 with the Diversity and Inclusion Breakfast, featuring diverse voices from across AI.

This year the awards saw hundreds of nominations (you can read them all here). They have all made outstanding contributions in the AI field, from advancing the work in ethics and fairness in AI, to trailblazing research critical to AI innovation, to ensuring young women entering the field have the opportunity and mentorship necessary to thrive.

Chosen by VentureBeat leadership from the open nominations, below are your 2020 Women in AI Award winners. We would like to thank everyone for their continued commitment to the field of AI.

AI Entrepreneur Winners

Michele Romanow, Cofounder and President, Clearbanc
Sofia Elizondo, Cofounder & COO, Brightseed

AI Mentorship Winner

Meeta Dash, VP of Product, Appen

AI Research Winner

Anima Anandkumar, Bren professor and director of ML research, California Institute of Technology, and director of ML research at Nvidia

Responsibility & Ethics of AI Winner

Carly Eckert, senior medical director, KenSci

Rising Star Winner

Kate Kallot, Director, AI ecosystem and developer relations, Arm

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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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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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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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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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Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

Tag Archives: Announcing

Announcing Plant-Based Machine Learning

Potato (Solanum tuberosum)

Avocado (Persea americana)

Kale (Brassica oleracea)

Wrapping Up

AI Weekly: Announcing our ‘AI and the future of health care’ special issue

VentureBeat

AI Weekly: Announcing our ‘Automation and jobs in the new normal’ special issue

Announcing the Women in AI Awards winners

AI Entrepreneur Winners

AI Mentorship Winner

AI Research Winner

Responsibility & Ethics of AI Winner

Rising Star Winner

Announcing RapidMiner 9.7 — Making data science a team sport

RapidMiner Server is now RapidMiner AI Hub

AI Hub includes a new projects framework

Projects offers precise version control

Supports large-scale collaboration

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

AI Weekly: Announcing our AI and security special issue

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

Announcing new data protection capabilities in Power BI

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

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