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How NetSuite Helps Creativity Explored Build a Stronger Community for People With Disabilities

November 26, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Kendall Fisher, Executive Producer and Host of The NetSuite Podcast

Approximately one million Americans live with a developmental disability, and many of them struggle to belong, to find a sense of community or a means to be financially self-sustainable.

That’s exactly the hole Creativity Explored seeks to fulfill.

Based out of San Francisco, California—with a population of 9,000 people with disabilities—the nonprofit works with more than 130 artists who have developmental disabilities, providing space, supplies, professional instruction and exhibition opportunities to promote and sell their work. In fact, the organization gives 50% of any sale back to the artist, supporting its artists financial independence.

[embedded content]On this episode of “The NetSuite Podcast,” we sat down with Creativity Explored’s Development Director, Megan Hover, to discuss the organization’s impact on the world, how it’s able to provide this opportunity for its artists and how NetSuite helps fuel its important mission.

Hover discusses the importance of building a community for these artists as well as the positive impact their work has within the art world and upon the conversation around people with disabilities. She dives into the ways in which the company raises money to continue empowering its artists, and how NetSuite’s single view into the organization’s donations, donor relationships, sales and spending allows for more efficient processes.

Hover also discusses how NetSuite’s SuiteDonation and Suite Pro-Bono programs have impacted the organization’s ability to better harness its use of NetSuite, creating better processes that are then used to make better decisions for the good of its artists. For example, she says NetSuite’s customization for tracking grant application, grant report deadlines and grant prospecting has helped Creativity Explored grow its grant funding by 300% over the past two years.

Hover concludes by explaining why other nonprofits should consider implementing NetSuite and reveals her hopes for the future of the organization.

Tune in to listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube.

Posted on Mon, November 25, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Power BI Developer community November 2019 update

November 22, 2019 Self-Service BI

This blog post covers the latest updates for the Power BI Developer community. Don’t forget to check out our last developer blog post, if you haven’t done so already.

Here is the list of updates for this month:

Embedded analytics updates

Automation & life-cycle management

Connecting a report to datasets using dynamic binding

Clone and Rebind APIs support shared dataset

API for generating embed token for multiple items

Embed capabilities

Embedded paginated reports

Embedded AI – Decomposition tree

Automatic Page Refresh supported in Power BI Embedded

Personalize your table and matrix hyperlinks behavior

Interact with your embedded mobile report with single tap

Bootstrap your iframe to Improve rendering performance

Power BI visuals platform updates

Context menu support

Automation & life-cycle management

Connecting a report to datasets using dynamic binding

This exciting feature is mainly aimed at ISVs and developers that have many customers, each having their own workspace containing a dataset connected to a Power BI report. Instead of copying and maintaining hundreds of report duplicates, ISVs and developers can now maintain a single template of a report that can be connected to multiple datasets across workspaces. The same report displays different information, depending on the dataset it is connected to. For example, a report showing retail sale values can be connected to different retailer datasets, and produce different results, depending on the dataset of the retailer it is connected to. This is achieved by adding the wanted dataset to the embed configuration before embedding.

Learn more

DynamicBinding Power BI Developer community November 2019 update

Clone and Rebind APIs support shared datasets

Shared datasets are now supported across all embedding solutions, allowing partners and customers to manage the connections of Power BI datasets and reports across workspaces. This capability enabled us to expand the following APIs and automate related scenarios:

Rebind report REST API allows now to rebind a report to a dataset across workspaces, replacing the need to create and maintain many datasets and fulfilling the organizational requirement to maintain ‘one source of truth’ in a centrally managed dataset.
Clone report REST API allows now to copy reports across workspaces while maintaining the original connection with the dataset that resides in a different workspace (similar to Copy reports in Power BI Service).

API for generating embed token for multiple items

The new API is aimed at ISVs and developers, embedding Power BI content into applications for their customers (aka ‘App owns data’ solution). It allows to generate an embed token with permissions for multiple reports, datasets, and target workspaces. Reports and datasets do not have to be related and binding of a report to a dataset can be done during embedding (see Connecting a report to datasets using dynamic binding).

The API for generating embed token for multiple items has many other advantages for customers, other than supporting shared dataset related automation scenarios and dynamic binding. Among these are ease of implementation and management when embedding multiple items, reports drill through scenarios, and improved performance when switching between reports.

Embed capabilities

Embedded paginated reports

As announced in our recently posted blog, the scenario of embedding paginated reports in your own application for your customers (aka ‘App owns data’ solution), is now in public preview. In addition, the scenario of embedding paginated reports into your organization’s internal apps and portals (aka ‘User owns data’ solution), is now GA.

AppWithPaginatedReport Power BI Developer community November 2019 update

Embedded AI – Decomposition tree

Decomposition tree visual was recently announced a public preview in Power BI Desktop. We are thrilled to announce that this highly requested feature is also supported in Power BI Embedded. A decomposition tree can be used to perform root-cause analysis by viewing how individual categories in a group contribute to the whole. The visual lets you decompose, or break down, a group to see its individual categories and how they can be ranked according to a selected measure, such as by sales amount.

Learn more

Automatic Page Refresh supported in Power BI Embedded

Automatic page refresh for DirectQuery was announced a public preview in the October 2019 release of Power BI Desktop. This feature is highly requested by Power BI Embedded partners and customers as well, and we are now supporting it.

When monitoring critical events with Power BI Embedded, it’s important that the data is reflected as soon as the data source gets updated. For example, in the manufacturing industry, it’s critical to know when a machine is malfunctioning. To enable this, we are following Power BI Service and releasing the automatic page refresh capability, which allows you to set the refresh interval of visuals in your report when using a DirectQuery source. For extremely fast updating sources, this near real-time experience will allow your consumers to monitor time-critical reports and ensure that they are always viewing the latest.

Automatic page refresh for reports in Power BI Embedded is configured with steps similar to the configuration in Power BI Service. Enabling the feature and setting the minimum refresh interval are the same for Power BI Embedded Azure capacities and for Power BI Premium capacities (see here).

Learn more

Personalize your table and matrix hyperlinks behavior

We have added a new user action event, ‘dataHyperlinkClicked’. Power BI supports hyperlink columns. When clicking on a hyperlink cell in a table or matrix native visuals, the URL will be loaded into a new browsing context. With ‘dataHyperlinkClicked’ event, application owners can control hyperlink cell click behavior, by setting report embed configurations to raise an event and provide their custom event handler. The event contains the selected URL, and the click source – report, page and visual.

Learn more

Interact with your embedded mobile report with single tap

This feature is supported in the Power BI mobile application since April 2019 and now we have added support for mobile embedded analytics within our partners and customers’ applications. With a single tap interaction, a visual is selected and the desired action is executed at the same time.

Bootstrap your iframe to Improve rendering performance

The new powerbi.bootstrap(element,config) allows developers to start embedding before all required parameters are available. The bootstrap API prepares and initializes the iframe. When using the bootstrap API, it is still required to call powerbi.embed(element,config) on the same HTML element. One of the use cases for this feature for example, is to run the iframe bootstrap and the back-end calls for embedding (for instance, generate embed token), in parallel. It is highly recommended to use the bootstrap API when it is possible to generate the iframe before it is visible to the end user.

Learn more

What is the context menu?

Typically users hover over data points in a visual for the right-click menu to be available. To provide a unified and smooth experience to all users using any Power BI visuals, we recommend that our developers and partners enable the context menu in their existing and new visuals’ submissions. We have also updated our guidelines for Power BI visuals.

This is a heads-up that we’ll add this new requirement to our submission process for any new visuals or any updates of existing visuals in the coming months.

How to add the context menu to your visual?

You can find the usage guide here.

For any question and help please reach out to pbicvsupport@microsoft.com

That’s all for this post. We hope you found it useful. Please continue to send us your feedback – it’s very important for us! Have an amazing feature in mind? Please share it or vote in our Power BI Embedded Analytics Ideas forum, or our Custom Visuals Ideas forum.

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Exclusive LIVE Community Event #2 – Ask Amir Anything

November 12, 2019 Self-Service BI

Next up in our Triple A Live Event Series:

Have you ever wanted the chance to ask Technical Fellow Amir Netz questions about the latest updates, features and future? Now’s your chance! On November 20^th, 2019 at 12 PM Pacific Time, we’ll be hosting another exclusive, invitation only, live event.

Head on over to the Power BI community to find out how you can get a chance to join: https://aka.ms/PBICommEvents

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Win Power BI Swag with Community Kudopalooza!

October 19, 2019 Self-Service BI

This week, we are announcing our Power BI Kudopalooza community event. As part of the event, community members can complete activities and be entered in drawings for cool Power BI Swag each week.

The Power BI Community is where you can see cool examples of how people are using Power BI, connect with others and have your questions answered.

Want to know more? Head on over to the Power BI community forums to find out how to participate and – Enter to WIN SWAG!

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University Book Store Goes Back to School, Upgrading Ecommerce, POS, Back-Office Solutions to Better Serve UW Students and Community

September 26, 2019 NetSuite

180824 1719%20(1) University Book Store Goes Back to School, Upgrading Ecommerce, POS, Back Office Solutions to Better Serve UW Students and Community

Posted by Ian McCue, Content Manager

As the name indicates, University Book Store is a campus bookstore, but it’s much more than that. The independent bookstore for the University of Washington sells not only the standard lineup of textbooks, school supplies and Husky apparel, but also trade books that would be found at any local bookstore, non-school-themed apparel, technology and cosmetics.

University Book Store serves not just students, faculty and staff, but the local community as well, with five stores sprinkled throughout Seattle and the Puget Sound area. Its flagship store is located just off-campus in Seattle’s U District. That 100,000-square-foot store on “The Ave” accounts for about 85% of the retailer’s sales.

“I’d say we’re more like a Macy’s or Nordstrom than we are a Barnes & Noble, just because we have so many different departments,” University Book Store CIO Erin Olinick said. “We’re really known as being the one-stop campus shop.”

The Book Store sells textbooks for not only the University of Washington’s main campus but UW’s Tacoma and Bothell locations, two other nearby colleges and 14 private high schools.

Struggling with Omnichannel Demands

While University Book Store’s business model is unique, it faces the same challenges as just about any retailer. Its customers’ expectations are higher than ever before as they demand a combination of convenience, speed and highly competitive prices. Meeting those expectations is imperative as the Book Store faces intense competition from Amazon, book publishers selling direct to students and other online shops.

University Book Store did its best to adapt to a rapidly changing retail landscape, but a legacy RATEX solution was an unavoidable roadblock. The 35-year-old system, built on Linux and locally hosted, managed accounting, point-of-sale and inventory. Employees had to decipher the RATEX system’s black-and-white, MS DOS-like user interface (you’re forgiven if you’re unfamiliar with all of that; suffice to say, the technology was archaic). Only one employee knew how to code the system and became the gatekeeper for any software modifications.

Additionally, University Book Store’s homegrown ecommerce solution involved a complex layering of servers that received point-of-sale and inventory information through an API that updated every 24 hours. The result was often inaccurate inventory data that frustrated shoppers and staff.

“The system was absolutely impeding our ability to move forward and remain relevant in a really quickly moving and competitive industry,” Olinick said.

Moving Beyond Industry Solutions

After the Book Store determined it needed to overhaul its technology stack, it first turned to long-standing industry solutions from MBS Textbook Exchange, Nebraska Book Co. and Visual RATEX (a newer version of its current system).

It was not until Olinick’s team heard about The Duck Store at the University of Oregon using NetSuite that it considered the cloud-based, unified business management platform. University Book Store eventually chose NetSuite over Visual RATEX because it could provide a unified source of data from across the company that could help break down departmental siloes and improve communication.

“We really felt that NetSuite had the potential to push us to evolve and think in a much broader way,” Olinick said. “It really made us uncomfortable in a lot of ways, but that was something that we actually embraced, because we firmly believed that NetSuite would finally allow us to compete with other retailers, and our competition is not other bookstores, it’s other retailers.”

The versatile solution could support every aspect of the business, including ecommerce, point-of-sale, email marketing and back-end operations like financials, inventory management, order management and fulfillment.

Creating a Better Customer Experience

When customers visit the retailer’s online store, they can now add textbooks, clothing and headphones, for example, to a single cart instead of checking out multiple times for different departments. That streamlined process has helped increase order size and allows the company to cross-sell by taking advantage of product recommendations.

Today, shoppers can pick up their online orders in any University Book Store location same-day or pay for express shipping and preorder products before the store even receives them. Students can also sign up for a textbook rental account on the ecommerce site.

In-store, students can pay with their school-issued Husky Card. If a textbook is out-of-stock, the store can offer students an e-book version immediately instead of potentially losing the sale like in the past. About 12% of the retailer’s course materials revenue now comes from digital products like e-books and access codes, up from 3% with the old system.

Internally, NetSuite ERP provides a single source of data with automated reports on every aspect of the business, a vast improvement over manual reports in spreadsheets that required data entry. For example, it’s now easy for the Book Store to see the profitability of items or track expenses by location or department instead of trying to dig up high-level information in a massive spreadsheet. On the vendor side, it can view credit balances by supplier and outstanding checks to better manage cash flow. Those insights help the retailer make informed decisions about pricing and promotions.

Access to more detailed customer data, including where they shop and how much they spend, allows the store to send more personalized emails to various customer segments through the Bronto marketing platform. That’s led to a big bump in the ROI of University Book Store’s email campaigns.

Additionally, the Book Store can look at how many customers are purchasing digital copies of textbooks to reduce procurement of physical copies. That has lowered both shipping and handling costs and inventory carrying expenses.

But those quantitative benefits are second to the increased collaboration and employee empowerment provided by a system that everyone can access.

“My favorite thing about NetSuite is that my staff has really kind of become their own business owners, job owners,” said Matt Schleede, course materials manager. “They all have responsibilities on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and they’ve been able to run their own reports and kind of relearn how to do their jobs in a way that makes themselves more efficient. When they’re working to their best of their abilities … it makes the business more efficient.”

University Book Store continues to recognize new gains as it takes advantage of more aspects of the platform’s capabilities. It sees this as only the beginning of a long journey.

The nearly 120-year-old company is ready for the future and the ever-changing expectations of its customers with a solution that has the flexibility and backing to evolve with it.

“It’s pretty amazing to know our systems and processes are not stuck in one place anymore,” Olinick said. “The collaborative environment we now have with staff asking each other questions is helping us to crack open the areas of our business that we didn’t have visibility into before, because things were so automated and so hidden in our old system that we weren’t able to make changes to them.”

Learn more about NetSuite’s software for campus bookstores.

Posted on Wed, September 25, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Power BI Developer community June & July update

August 1, 2019 Self-Service BI

This blog post covers the latest updates for the Power BI Developer community. Don’t forget to check out our latest developer blog post, if you haven’t done so already.

Here is the list of updates for this month:

Embedded analytics

Automation & Embed capabilities

Service Principal is generally available

Embed paginated reports into your organization’s apps and portals (preview)

Create and personalize report visuals with Visual Authoring API

Improved rendering performance

Support for the new filter experience in embedded reports

Power BI Embedded in Azure

Know what your Power BI Embedded capacity can handle

New resource creation and pricing experience in Azure portal

New region available for Power BI Embedded in South Africa North

Power BI visuals platform

Multi-selection support

Context menu support

Milestones support for the Gantt chart visual

Come and meet us!

Automation & embed capabilities

Service principal is generally available

We are excited to announce that service principal, released as preview back in February, is now generally available.

Service principal allows you to access resources or perform operations using Power BI API without the need for a user to sign in or have a Power BI Pro license. Service principal can also embed content for non-Power BI users in 3^rd party applications.

Since the Preview release, the following capabilities have been added to service principal:

Schedule dataset refreshes – since service principal cannot log in to the Power BI portal, it cannot configure scheduled refreshes. To tackle this challenge, we released a new API that configures scheduled refreshes for datasets, so that service principal can use it. Learn more.
Share workspaces with service principal – Workspaces can be shared with service principal, just like any other Power BI user, by typing the service principal name in the ‘email address’ field. Power BI will auto complete the service principal name for faster searching.
Admin portal – enabling service principal is performed in the Admin portal. Now, a Power BI Admin can enable access to service principals for the entire organization.

Note: it is recommended to enable service principal access only from specific security groups. Learn more

Embed paginated reports into your organization’s internal apps and portals (Preview)

Paginated reports brings a new set of enterprise reporting capabilities to the Power BI service. It enables developers and BI professionals to create and distribute highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports alongside their interactive Power BI content, becoming the first cloud BI solution that combines the power of self-service BI with the needs and capabilities of traditional Enterprise BI scenarios.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the public preview of embedding paginated reports into your organization’s internal applications and portals. As part of this capability, you can simply get the embed URL by calling the GetReports API and use it to embed the paginated report in your application or portal. To get started, you can follow this article with the relevant modifications related to paginated reports.

Other APIs that can help you to automate the embedding of paginated reports by exporting and importing reports are GetImports, PostImport, and ExportReport.

Create and personalize report visuals programmatically with Visual Authoring API

The new and exciting Power BI Report Authoring SDK extension was added recently. This extension allows to programmatically create visuals, bind them to columns, measures, hierarchies, and personalize them by setting properties like axis visibility and titles. Installed custom visuals are supported as well!

Following are several use cases which are supported now by using the new API:

ISVs that provide their customers with a friendly 3-4 step wizard for self-creation and personalization of new visuals
ISVs that provide their customers with a friendly UI to customize existing reports for further exploration
A chatbot that builds embedded visual analytics in the bot, based on user inquiries

Learn more in our wiki, try the Power BI Embedded Playground Quick Visual Creator Showcase and interact with the new APIs in the Sample tool.

Improved rendering performance

The following improvements were added recently:

Embedding different reports into the same iframe – allowing apps that provide their end-users with a list of reports to use the same iframe, switch between the reports, and thus achieve better performance than embedding in new iframes. To use this functionality, all you need to do is to call embed() method with the same div element.
Code example:
// Embed to reportContainer div element with embed configuration
powerbi.embed(reportContainerDivElement, embedConfiguration1);
// Switch to another report on button click
function onButtonClick() {
// Embed to THE SAME reportContainer div element with ANOTHER embed configuration
powerbi.embed(reportContainerDivElement, embedConfiguration2);
}
Query caching for embedded reports – Query caching is now available for embedded reports backed by Power BI Premium or Power BI Embedded capacity. Query Caching speeds up content loading by caching previously used query results. Controlling query caching is done on the dataset settings page in the Power BI service. Learn more.

If you haven’t done it yet, we encourage you to follow the guidelines in the Power BI Embedded performance best practices article. Here are some of the useful tips you can find in the article:

Install version 2.6.5 or higher of Power BI client SDK. We continue to release more enhancements, so make sure to follow up from time to time and update your SDK version.

Avoid generating the embed URL yourself. Instead, make sure you get the embed URL by calling the Get reports, Get dashboards, or Get tiles API. We added a new parameter to the URL called config, used for performance improvements.

It’s also important to build your reports to be fast and reliable in any platform. Please follow the Power BI performance best practices article to make sure you use the best practices.

Support for the new filter experience in embedded reports

The new filter experience in Power BI reports is now available for embedded reports as well. By turning on the new experience you enjoy the new design and useful features, such as hide, lock, and rename filters. By using the JavaScript SDK – Filters APIs, filters can now be defined with advanced filter pane capabilities.

Power BI Embedded in Azure

Know what your Power BI Embedded capacity can handle

A tool for automating load testing of Power BI Embedded capacities was released recently. This tool can help you understand how much user load your capacity can handle when used. It uses PowerShell to create automated load tests against your capacities, and lets you choose which reports to test and how many concurrent users to simulate.

The tool will generate load on a capacity by continuously rendering each report with new filter values (to prevent unrealistically good performance due to report caching) until the token required for authenticating the tool against the service expires.

Using the new tool, capacity administrators can get a better understanding of how many users their capacity can handle in a given time frame. The tool can also be used by report authors that wish to understand the user load effect of performance improvements measured with Power BI desktop’s Performance Analyzer

While the tool is running, users can both see the renders happening in real time on their browsers, as well as connect to the XMLA endpoints of the capacities being measured with SQL Server Profiler to see the queries execute as they come.

As the load test is executing, its effects will also be visible in the premium capacity metrics app’s Datasets page. Capacity admins can use this tool to generate load and see how that load shows up. Be sure to read the Premium Deployment whitepaper section about identifying overload in the metrics app beforehand. The scenarios analyzed in this whitepaper apply for Power BI Embedded capacities as well.

To see the effects of the load test in the metrics app after the test runs, admins should expand the “Datasets” tab of their metrics app landing page and initiate an on-demand refresh by clicking “refresh now”. Admins should expect up to a 15 minutes lag from the time the test starts generating load until the time that load is visible in the metrics.

To host the tool and other future tools and utilities, we established a new GitHub repository. The entire repository is Open Source and users are welcomed to contribute, add additional tools and repositories related to Power BI Premium and Embedded capacities, and improve the existing ones.

Please be mindful of the existing load on your capacities and make sure not to run load tests during top usage times.
We look forward to hearing your feedback from using the tool and your contributions to the repository!

New resource creation and pricing experience in Azure portal

Users creating and managing Power BI Embedded capacities in Azure, can now enjoy a new user experience in the Azure Portal. The resource creation form is now a full-screen experience, and it displays a summary of the resource before provisioning. It also allows to create a resource with tags, and the pricing cards in resource creation, and scale experiences were replaced by a tabular design.

New region available for Power BI Embedded in South Africa North

Power BI now has its first available region in Africa, located in Johannesburg (South Africa North).

This new region allows customers to locate their Power BI deployments closer to their data sources, either in Azure or on-premises, enabling faster data refresh performance and lower networking egress costs.

With the addition of this new region, Power BI is now available in 19 regions in our global public cloud, in addition to 6 regions in our three national clouds, Power BI for US Government, Power BI Germany, and Power BI China.

Existing public cloud customers can leverage these new regions by deploying Power BI Embedded Multi-Geo capacity. New customers will be automatically provisioned in these regions based on their tenant country and state.

If you’re puzzled or run into any issues, be sure to check our resources that can help you:

‘Troubleshooting’ doc to help you bypass all the obstacles on your way to building a great app.
FAQ doc to answer all your questions regarding the product, licensing, and Azure capacities.
Community forum for developers, to seek answers or ask any other questions you have.

Multi-selection support

As of API 2.6.1, Power BI visuals created with our SDK (aka custom visuals) support multi-selection, similar to out-of-the box visuals.

Previously, if you wanted to filter out this report based on two data points, for example: “Men” from the first visual below and “OH” from the second visual below (by holding Ctr+ multi-selecting), visuals in the reports were filtered out based on the second selection only, i.e., “OH”

Now, when you multi-select data points as shown below, the rest of the visuals in the report will filter out based on both selections (“Men”+ “OH”), as shown below.

We recommend that you enable this capability for all your visuals to provide a smooth and unified experience to all users.

How to enable this capability?

Simply add “supportsMultiVisualSelection”= “true” to the capabilities of the visual.

Last November we enabled the context menu (right-click menu) for visuals created by our SDK (aka custom visuals).

Users typically hover over data points in a visual for the right-click menu to be available.

To provide a unified and smooth experience to all users using any Power BI visual, we recommend that our developers and partners enable the context menu in their existing and new visuals’ submissions. We also updated our guidelines for Power BI visuals.

This is a heads-up that we’ll add this as a new requirement to our submission process for any new visuals or any updates of existing visuals in September.

For more details please check out this article.

For any question and help please reach out to pbicvsupport@microsoft.com

Milestones for our Gantt chart visual

We’re excited to announce that the most requested feature for our Gantt chart is available in the recent version.

Now users can create new types of a task (Milestone) to show important stages in the project.

Please download the sample report to see Milestones in action.

As always, feel free to use all the communication channels at your disposal to connect with our team, share your thoughts and ask questions:

Aviv Ezrachi, the Group Product Manager of Power BI for Developers, is delivering a breakout session about Power BI Embedded at the Data Platform Summit 2019 – Bengaluru India, Aug 22-24. Be sure not to miss it!

That’s all for this post. We hope you found it useful. Please continue sending us your feedback – it’s very important for us! Have an amazing feature in mind? Please share it or vote in our Power BI Embedded Analytics Ideas forum, or our Custom Visuals Ideas forum.

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Power BI Developer community April & May update

June 10, 2019 Self-Service BI

This blog post covers the latest updates for Power BI Developers community. Don’t forget to check out our latest developer blog post, if you haven’t done so already.

Here is the list of updates for this month-

Embedded analytics

Automation & life-cycle management

Explore Power BI API with ‘Try-it’ tool

Upload Datasets only with ‘Import’ API

Refresh user permissions programmatically

Embed capabilities

‘Key influencers’ AI visual available in embedded reports

Auto install Apps for consumers of embedded content

Accessibility improvements

Power BI visuals’ Platform

General Updates

Power BI visuals SDK updates

Come and meet us!

Automation & life-cycle management

Explore Power BI API with ‘Try-it’ tool

We are very happy to announce that Power BI now offers a new tool to interactively explore Power BI REST API without any code. Anyone with a Power BI license can log into his account and see how the API works, get information or perform operation on Power BI artifacts you have access to.

‘Try-it’ enables you to explore how each REST call works, what are the required params, structure of response or errors, and what data comes back, all within a minute!

How can I use ‘Try-it’?

Go to Power BI REST API documentation
Choose a specific API call that you wish to use or explore. Inside the documentation you will find the HTTP URL structure. On the top-right corner you will find a green button with the text ‘Try it’. Click on the green button.

Once clicked, a right pane will open, asking you to sign in to your AAD account.

After signing in, the Tool will open in the right pane. You can add parameters to the call to get specific result. Some calls require to mention specific parameters. For example, ‘Get Reports In Group’ needs the Workspace (group) ID to perform the call.

Click ‘Run’ and see the response.

Upload Datasets only with ‘Import’ API

Power BI APIs allows you to upload content into a workspace using the ‘Import’ API, which uploads a PBIX file. As we know, a PBIX contains both a report and a dataset, and they are uploaded together.

There are cases where this coupling is not optimal, and you might prefer to handle each object separately for automation scenarios. So in order to manage datasets separately from reports, we added ‘skipReport’ parameter to the ‘Import’ API that only uploads the dataset into the specified workspace.

This new API can be useful in few cases:

A BI developer has made a change in the model only, and he doesn’t want to override the connected report in the PBIX. He can use the API to update only the dataset, without changing any of the reports bound to this dataset.
Update a bulk of datasets with the same schema, but different data (for different customers), without worrying if a report might be damaged from the update.
If you are an ISV and you have a new customer, you want to clone the golden analytics package for that customer, as recommended here. You can now upload only the relevant dataset, and then connect all the reports bounded to it through ‘Clone’ and ‘rebind’ APIs.

Refresh user permissions programmatically

When Power BI users are granted permissions to Power BI content, the refresh of permission is not always immediate and can take up to an hour in some cases. A common example for a delay in permissions refresh is when sharing content with a security group. If those users log into Power BI portal, his permissions are refreshed automatically, and he can see all the latest content he has access to. However, for Power BI users consuming content through external applications that embed Power BI content, the update in some cases will not happen immediately and users will not see or access new reports that were just shared with them.

The new ‘refresh user permissions’ API will run an update behind the scenes of the user permissions and make sure he can access everything he has permissions to, while avoiding the unpleasant scenarios described above.

We recommend calling this API at the beginning of every user session in your external application.

Embed capabilities

‘Key influencers’ AI visual available in embedded reports

AI can aid in data exploration by combing through the data to automatically find patterns, help users understand what the data means, and predict future outcomes. Power BI Embedded has been a pioneer in applying AI through natural language, which enables users to get answers by asking questions in plain English. We’re bringing more AI backed capabilities to Power BI Embedded analytics by delivering the key influencers analysis.

The Key influencers visual surfaces what factors influence a KPI’s rise or fall. For example, you want to analyze the factors that impact the user satisfaction of a product they bought from you. Factors that can impact this KPI can be the type of product they bought, the price, or even if the user is a first-time buyer vs a returning customer.

Machine learning is used to rank influencers, from most to least impactful, and a likelihood score and text description is provided to explain the impact. Users can drill into a factor to see the distribution of their data for that variable/category. As users interact with their reports, either through filtering or selecting visuals, the key drivers are re-evaluated and updated in real time.

Auto- install Apps for consumers of embedded content

Power BI Apps help organizations distribute collection of analytics to end users. Apps can be a good way to organize and distribute content for Power BI users who consume content in an external portal/ domain, and not through powerbi.com.

However, there’s a specific caveat to using Apps- users must have the App installed before they can access content. If they consume through powerbi.com, that’s not really a problem, but for users who consume embedded content, that can be blocker. They don’t want to go into the portal just to install the App, and some of those users don’t know how to use Power BI portal.

To overcome this, we added the option to auto install Apps for users when opening an embedded report/ dashboard. As the developer, you should first make sure you install the app yourself to be able to get the appId (either through the URL in the portal, or through API). Once acquired, you can add the parameter ‘&appId=bf98…’ to the end user’s embedUrl. Then, when a user tries to open a report from an uninstalled App, the App will be auto installed in the background, and the report will open for that user.

Accessibility improvements

In the past 2 months we added some accessibility improvements to applications using Power BI embedded analytics:

Allow keyboard navigation on elements appearing after the embedded report– In the new experience, pressing ‘Tab’ when focused on the embedded report will focus on the next tab-able element. To navigate inside the embedded report, press ‘ctrl’+’Enter’ when focused on the report. Pressing ‘Esc’ will exit PBI report navigation mode and focus back on the embedded report.
Allow developers to set the title attribute to the PBI Iframe for narration purposes.
Allow developers to set ‘tabIndex’ CSS attribute to the embedded element for tabbing and focusing purposes.

Community Spotlight

E2E sample for Token-based identity with Azure SQL

About a year ago, we added the capability for passing through the identity of the current user to the underlying SQL database, enabling a new form of a role based security implemented at the database level and not in Power BI. This mechanism of role-based security is compelling in implementations where there is already a rich set of security rules defined in the database. This feature can be used when embedding for non- Power BI users, so it is useful even if your SQL users are not Power BI users.

The new E2E sample provides a simple .net web application that authenticates an application user via AAD, generates the necessary AAD token for SQL Azure, and then generates a Power BI Embed token that passes through the AAD token to SQL Azure. The sample includes a detailed step by step guide for setting up all the configuration steps necessary within the different products.

Huge thanks to Chris Mitchell and Jon Lester for building this sample and contributing to all developers using Power BI Embedded.

If you are puzzled or run into a few issues, be sure to check our resources that can help you get by:

‘Troubleshooting’ doc to help you get by all the obstacles on your way for building a great app.
FAQ doc to answer all your question regarding the Product, licensing and Azure capacities.
Community forum for developers, to seek answers or ask any other questions you have.

General Updates

New version of powerbi-visual-tools

We are excited to announce that the new release of powerbi-visuals-tools v3 is now available!

This release brings a lot of new features and goodies for the Power BI visuals development experience.

With new Typescript v3 and support for ES6 modules, users can integrate modern versions of all popular libraries like D3 and v5.

What’s new in powerbi-visuals-tools v3?

TypeScript v3.0.1 by default
ES6 modules supported
New versions of D3v5 and other external libraries are supported
Reduced package size
Improved API performance

How to start using the new release?

For the full details and migration guide for powerbi-visuals-tools v3, please check this article.

See samples of visuals that were already migrated to the new toolset: Timeline slicer, Chord chart, Dual KPI, PowerKPI, Tornado, and more.

Please note that this toolset version is 3.1 which currently supports API v2.6.0.

Starting from our next release, the toolset will only support the modern toolset version as specified above. This means that future API versions will only be supported using the modern toolset.

For any question and help please contact pbicvsupport@microsoft.com

PowerKPI and PowerKPI Matrix visuals

The source code of our PowerKPI and PowerKPI Matrix visual is now available in GitHub!

It’s time to view, edit and extend!

PowerKPI

PowerKPI Matrix

Power BI visuals welcome React Framework

We’re excited to show a new way to create a Power BI visual based on one of the most current popular web-frameworks – React, a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Find here a step-by-step tutorial with detailed instructions on how to create simple CircleCard visuals with React.
If you’re looking for more advanced examples, check out our SampleBarChart-react

New features for API v2.6.0

Total and Subtotal API

This API enables matrix data-view custom visuals to request extra aggregated subtotal data from the Power BI host. The subtotals can be requested for the entire matrix dataset as well as fine-tuned for individual levels of the matrix data hierarchy (see below a sample report). The requests are applicable to bigger datasets and are highly efficient since the calculations are performed by the Power BI backend.

Every time a visual needs to refresh its data, it issues a data fetch request to the Power BI backend. The data the visual ordinarily requests is the values of the fields the user dragged into the field wells of the visual. In certain scenarios the visual may need to additionally request some aggregations/subtotals (e.g., sum, count) applied to the above fields. The API customizes the outgoing data query to request for the extra aggregation/subtotal data.

Without the API the visual would need to calculate the aggregations on its own. This would have been either computationally expensive (as opposed to backend calculations) or impossible since the bigger datasets can’t be fully fetched to the visual, resulting in data being cut off and the result of the calculation being incorrect. For each data-view type (currently just the matrix) the API offers Boolean customization switches, as listed below:

rowSubtotals
– Indicates if the subtotal data should be requested for all fields in the rows field well

rowSubtotalsPerLevel
– Indicates if the subtotal data can be toggled for individual fields in the rows field well

columnSubtotals
– Indicates if the subtotal data should be requested for all fields in the columns field well

columnSubtotalsPerLevel
– Indicates if the subtotal data can be toggled for individual fields in the columns field well

levelSubtotalEnabled
– Unlike all other properties, this property is applied to individual rows/columns. The property indicates if the subtotals are requested for the row/column

Each of the switches above gets assigned a value based on the values of the related properties in the property pane and the defaults. In the capabilities file, the visual has to specify a property each of the above switches maps to and also provide the default value to be used if the property is undefined.

The switches all look like this:

"rowSubtotals": { "propertyIdentifier": { "objectName": "subTotals", "propertyName": "rowSubtotals" }, "defaultValue": true },

The above, for example, indicates (to the standard logic) that the row subtotals are enabled by the property “rowSubtotals” in the “subTotals” object. And, if the value is supplied in the dataview (which happens if the property is not dirty), the default value of “true” will be assumed by the customization logic.

The API is automatically enabled for a visual whenever the subtotals structure and all the switch mappings are defined in the capabilities JSON file.

Below is an example of the complete API configuration in the capabilities JSON file (copied from the API sample visual):

"subtotals": { "matrix": { "rowSubtotals": { "propertyIdentifier": { "objectName": "subTotals", "propertyName": "rowSubtotals" }, "defaultValue": true }, "rowSubtotalsPerLevel": { "propertyIdentifier": { "objectName": "subTotals", "propertyName": "perRowLevel" }, "defaultValue": false }, "columnSubtotals": { "propertyIdentifier": { "objectName": "subTotals", "propertyName": "columnSubtotals" }, "defaultValue": true }, "columnSubtotalsPerLevel": { "propertyIdentifier": { "objectName": "subTotals", "propertyName": "perColumnLevel" }, "defaultValue": false }, "levelSubtotalEnabled": { "propertyIdentifier": { "objectName": "subTotals", "propertyName": "levelSubtotalEnabled" }, "defaultValue": true } } }

Please note that it’s important that the enumerateProperities() function of the visual is aligned with the defaults specified in the capabilities. E.g., if no properties are hanged by the user (no properties are dirty) the properties pane will display the subtotal defaults returned by enumerateProperties(). At the same time, the customization logic will operate according to the defaults specified in the capabilities (since no objects will be supplied in the dataview). Now, the two must be aligned. Otherwise, the actual subtotal customizations will differ from the user’s perception.

Check out this link for a sample. The sample report is in the DOC folder.

The visual is a functionally-reduced version of the native Matrix visual that offers the same subtotal-related customizations that are available in the Matrix visual.

To review the available customizations please expand the Subtotals drop-down menu in the property pane, modify the subtotals settings, and track the changes to the subtotals presentation (named Totals) by the visual.

In-focus edit API

Power BI visuals created with our SDK (aka custom visuals) can now enter focus mode programmatically with the new 2.6 API call in the visualHost:

switchFocusModeState: (on: boolean) => void

Parameters:

on – when true the visual will enter focus mode, when false the visual will exit focus mode.

The flag isInFocus in VisualUpdateOptions can be checked to find out if the visual is in a focus mode or not.

As always, feel free to use all the communication channels at your disposal to connect with our team, share your thoughts and ask questions:

Come and meet us!

Microsoft Business Applications Summit– upcoming sessions:

Microsoft Inspire– upcoming sessions:

That’s all for this post. We hope you found it useful. Please continue sending us your feedback, and it’s very important for us. Have an amazing feature in mind? Please share it or vote in our Power BI Embedded analytics Ideas forum, or our Custom Visuals Ideas forum.

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Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

May 20, 2019 Self-Service BI

Microsoft Business Applications Summit June 10 – 11 in Atlanta, Georgia is almost here and you have one more reason to attend year…A chance to meet the community super stars. We know, one of the primary reasons people go to conferences is to meet the presenters. And at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS), we have an entire “Ask the Experts” experience to make this easy to meet Microsoft full time employees…but what about community folks like MVPs, Authors and Industry experts?

We have created a community lounge and will be scheduling a subset of those community stars for you to interact with. Here are some highlights of the community members and topics you will find at this year’s MBAS.

Starting and Running a World Class PowerApps User Group by Keith Whatling

In addition to being a PowerApps MVP and one of the earliest/best PowerApps developers, Keith Whatling also started one of the first (and just recently recognized as one of the best) PowerApps user groups on the planet. Keith will be discussing the tactics that helped him in his community journey.

MS Ignite BaseballCards Design 2 HP final bleed 8 1 Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Keith Whatling is an experienced analyst with a demonstrated history of award-winning innovation in transportation. “I have a wealth of experience from digital content creation and data analysis to Microsoft’s Power Platform, using PowerApps and Flow to drive digital transformation. I can hold my own with Python, VBA and have some C# experience.”

Collaboratively Organizing One of the Largest Power BI Groups by Prathy Kamasani

Prathy Kamasani helps organize one of the largest Power BI user groups in the world and in this session she will share with the community how she manages this process and continues growing their membership.

prathy kamasani 600x431 Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Prathy Kamasani is a Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP) working as an independent MSBI contractor based in London. She specializes in Power BI, SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. Prathy is active in the Microsoft Data community as a speaker, volunteer, and organizes the London Power BI User Group.

Running the Largest Power BI Community Site in the World by Mike Carlo

In addition to co-managing one of the most successful US Power BI user groups, Power BI MVPs Mike Carlo and Seth Bauer also manage to find time to host the largest Power BI community site in the world. Wondering how? Then this session is for you!

Mike Carlo Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Power BI MVP, user group leader and frequent conference speaker that is Passionate about data, analytics and helping people learn same has developed a website knowledge repository for all things PowerBI, (www.PowerBI.Tips). This site is uniquely set up for people to read and learn about data modeling and visualizations within Power BI with over 60 kudos to date!

How to Leverage the Microsoft Communities Platform and Grow to a Super Community by Seth Bauer

In addition to co-managing one of the most successful US Power BI user groups, Power BI MVPs Seth Bauer and Mike Carlo also manage to find time to host the largest Power BI community site in the world. Additionally, Seth Bauer finds the time to answer many of the Power Service questions in the community forums. Find out how he gets his information.

Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

About Seth Bauer: I am a Director of Business Intelligence at Syndigo. I’m a Microsoft Data Platform MVP (Power BI). I’ve been working with the Microsoft stack for over 10 yrs, but my major focus area now is Power BI, and sharing what I’ve learned with the User Community. I am a Microsoft Certified Professional, a co-leader of this Microsoft Power BI User Group, and a PUG Board of Advisors member. I enjoy working with clients across the Midwest implementing BI / Power BI solutions.

How to use Microsoft Forums to Learn DAX by Phil Seamark

Author, conference organizer, User Group leader, MVP Alumni, and now Microsoft employee, Phil Seamark is recognized as one of the foremost DAX experts. He recently confided in a community gathering that most of what he learned in DAX was through his participation in community forums. In this informal get together, discuss with Phil his techniques for leveraging community forums into his incredible resume of experiences.

Philip Seamark 400x400 Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Philip Seamark is an author, Microsoft Data Platform MVP employee of the Power BI CAT Team, and an experienced database and business intelligence (BI) professional with a deep knowledge of the Microsoft B.I. stack along with extensive knowledge of data warehouse (DW) methodologies and enterprise data modelling. He has 25+ years experience in this field and is an active member of Power BI community. He is a Super User with 1,945 answers and 590 kudos on the community website http://community.powerbi.com

The Value of Joining the Dynamics Online Community by Fawad Khan

Strategy and operations leader with 15+ years of experience managing businesses from $ 10-20M and leading global IT teams of 100+. “I have helped deliver over $ 5M in cost savings in Service Delivery along with a 5% improvement in Customer/Partner Experience.” Fawad is a Digital and Cloud Computing strategist in today’s world of AI, Machine Learning, IoT and Hybrid Computing.

TT6zG4s Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/fawadakhan1/

The Magic Around Delivering an Amazing Presentation by Mico Yuk

Based on requests and feedback on her story-telling presentation, Mico has agreed to share with the community her best practices on delivering an amazing presentation.

4sIX9cDAR3GUp3WgHuCj Mico heashot Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Mico Yuk (@micoyuk) is the founder of BI Brainz (the leader in enterprise visual storytelling) and the BI Dashboard Formula (BIDF) methodology. She has trained thousands globally on how to use the power of data visualization strategically to enhance the decision-making process. In the last nine years, her company has worked with Fortune 500 companies like Procter & Gamble, Honda, Kimberly-Clark, Royal Dutch Shell, Nestle, Qatargas, Ericsson, and FedEx. She has also authored Data Visualization for Dummies (Wiley 2014).

The Art of Creating a Microsoft Flow Presentation by Kent Weare

Kent Weare is an experienced leader who possesses strong technical skills. Passionate about architecture with a specialty in integration, he is recognized by Microsoft as an Integration MVP.

Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

How to Use Community to Make the World a Better Place by Shannon Lindsey

Shannon Lindsay of the Informatics Team at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF) runs the Power BI User Group (PUG) community in Washington, DC. Her associate, Stephanie Bruno, runs the PUG in Pittsburgh, PA. They also run an internal PUG at EGPAF in which they invite all countries to meet (via conference calls) to share resources and ideas and collaborate on projects.

In this session, Lindsay will share her story of how “Community has been the key to our success in relation to the implementation of Power BI (among other technologies) here at EGPAF. In fact, it is because of our relationships with the community that these trainings happened at all! Stephanie heard about the Microsoft MySkills4Afrika program a few years ago from a volunteer at the Data Insights conference in Seattle.”

Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Shannon Lindsey is a data and analytics professional specializing in collection, management, and use of targeted data for program improvement and strategic decision making, solving problems for non-profit and government.

What It Takes to Be a PowerApps Flow MVP by Anton Robbins

Anton Robbins is the CTO of Seisay IT Solutions, a PowerApps and Flow MVP, PowerApps Champion, DC PowerApps User Group Leader and slayer of bow ties. That he has a passion for the Microsoft Power Platform (Flow, Power BI, and PowerApps) communities is an understatement. “It takes a community to elevate technical brethren.” When he is not speaking at an event, he is usually volunteering or organizing events. He has been, in the past and currently is, a speaker at Microsoft conferences and local User Groups. In his spare time, which he rarely has, he likes to roller skate.

Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Becoming a Community Super User by Gilbert Quevauvilliers

While there are roughly 500 Business Applications MVPs including Power BI, Dynamics, PowerApps, and Flow, there are fewer than 50 community super users who answer the unanswerable questions in the Microsoft forums. Gilbert Quevauvilliers will share his process for getting this knowledge and how to best use the Microsoft forums.

Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

“Currently, I’m working as a Power BI & Data Analytics Consultant. I have over 10+ years’ experience working with data of any size and any source. By leveraging my skills, I am able to provide insights into customers’ data quickly and efficiently. And this has enabled my customers to gain a better understanding of their business. Which relates to better sales, or significant cost savings.

“I was recently awarded a Microsoft MVP award for Power BI. Power BI, in my opinion, is the logical choice for creating insights, being cost-effective and providing dashboards and reports on Web, Mobile, or in Apps out of the box.

“I have proven competencies in the implementation of data analytic solutions from the ground up, which included developing data warehouses, SSAS Cubes and, most recently, Power BI solutions for customers in various business sectors.

“I have worked within teams, managed teams, as well as worked alone on various successful data analytics projects.

“I have focused on providing Power BI Solutions to customers since the inception of Power BI in July 2015.”

https://www.fourmoo.com

Demystifying the MVP Process by Julie Yack

In addition to running a Dynamics User Group conference, Julie Yack is one of the most distinguished of the Dynamic MVPs. In this informal get together, Julie will be happy to field any questions about the MVP program and nomination process.

julie yack v1 Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Julie Yack is a Colorado-based Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP serving clients across the globe, providing training, implementation, analysis and insight for companies wanting to take their service to the next level. Julie’s blog, http://www.julieyack.com addresses pertinent topics of the day, ranging from Dynamics CRM to technology in education to travel to voting rights.

Lounge Hosts

This all-star community will be joined by the entire Microsoft community team with members like Charles Sterling, Jon Levesque, Brian Dang, and Purvin Patel.

Jon Levesque

Jonathon Levesque Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

on Levesque is an entrepreneur and strategist with an expertise in brand engagement, community building and creating winning evangelism strategies. He is a Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft Flow product team focusing on helping Flow evangelize the product and how to use it, helping customers understand the platform and its benefits.

Jon’s background has ranged from project management to customer experience, to support and marketing. He has over 12 years in the industry and has helped lead community and engagement efforts in the low code/no code space since its inception. He has worked with large brands like Microsoft & HTC and smaller, local brands like Forterra NW Inc, as well as musical artists like Jethro Tull & DJ Nano.

As a speaker and educator, Jon has created the first Microsoft Flow EdX Course, The official Guided Learning material for Microsoft Flow and Ehang Drones and also created a series of YouTube videos guiding users on how to transform business process digitally using Microsoft Flow.

Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

Brian Dang now a program manager on the PowerApps team is helping shape the product to make it easier to use and adopt for the world of citizen developers. Formerly a third and fourth grade teacher, Brian Dang (known as Mr. Dang by his students) used PowerApps to create several education apps for teaching, managing his classroom, and gamifying the learning experience. In this in-depth interview, Brian shares his experience meeting Bill Gates, how he got started with PowerApps, how students and teachers are using apps in the classroom, and his vision for PowerApps in the education space. Teachers and students are very excited about using apps in the learning process. Not only do the kids get engaged in the subjects they are learning, but they also explore the technology and authoring tools used to create the custom apps, like the spelling and banking apps. His fourth graders even collaborated in teams to create their own apps, such as one with a Harry Potter theme. Since recording this video, Brian has joined the PowerApps team to execute his vision of bringing PowerApps into the classroom and enabling teachers, students and administrators to “not settle for the apps they have, but create the apps they want.”

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Spot.im raises $25 million for community creation and moderation tools

April 30, 2019 Big Data

Internet discussion sections are perennially problematic for publishers, particularly when they’re anonymous. In a 2012 study, researchers found that commentators who chose not to reveal their identities tended to pen more “contrarian” and “extreme” replies than those who used their real names, and scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that the nastier the feedback about an article, the more polarized readers tend to become about that article’s contents.

The sad state of affairs prompted Ishay Green, Nadav Shoval, and Roee Goldberg to investigate a solution to foster healthier online interactions. Their brainchild — Spot.im, a provider of cloud-based community creation and moderation tools — launched in 2012, and went on to attract clients like Microsoft, Aol, NBC, Refinery, Huffington Post, Time, Fox News, Little Things, Advertising Age, and USA Today Sport.

Now, it’s gearing up for its next stage of growth.

Spot.im today announced that it’s secured $ 25 million in series D financing led by Insight Venture Partners, with contributions from Millhouse Capital, AltaIR Capital, Cerca, and Jonah Goodhart. The fresh capital brings the company’s war chest to $ 63 million, following a $ 13 million series A round in August 2016 and a $ 25 million series C round in November 2017.

“Our goal has always been to provide publishers with the ability to build a sustainable business organically through their content and community — not arbitrary clicks,” said CEO Shoval, who added that Spot.im is now the largest community platform partner to more than 80% of “top-tier” U.S. publishers that collectively get hundreds of millions of unique monthly visitors. “We are excited by the enthusiasm of our investors and partners for the platform that we’re building. Together, we look forward to shaping a new era for the digital media industry that’s focused first and foremost on delivering the value and experience that readers deserve.”

Spot.im’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution can be deployed on a website in just a few lines of code, or integrated with a smartphone app with a bespoke software development kit. Spot.im’s embeddable comments boast bubble awareness indicators that encourage live chats and support rich media like photos, videos, and personalized feeds, and its moderation tools tap machine learning algorithms to automatically detect and remove offending replies and spam.

Spot.im additionally provides products that recycle sites’ most popular content, monetize advertising within user-generated content, and host community and product review pages. And on the reporter side of the equation, Spot.im offers a social live-blogging tool that enables writers to cover real-time updates with layered posts from “anywhere,” including third-party apps like Slack, and to respond to reader comments inline.

“Pressures of monetization have been poisonous to the digital media industry,” said newly appointed Spot.im president and board member Itzik Ben-Bassat. “It’s time that digital media companies begin looking beyond the low-hanging fruit of measuring growth by the sheer volume of clicks or impressions, and Spot.IM is the solution for just that.”

Spot.im, which was founded in Tel Aviv, has offices in New York.

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Power BI Developer community January update

February 23, 2019 Self-Service BI

This blog post covers the latest updates for Power BI Developers community. Don’t forget to check out our latest developer blog post, if you haven’t done so already.

Here is the list of updates for embedded analytics…

Automation & life-cycle management

Use Power BI API with service principal (Preview)

Schedule refresh API

Get Power BI Apps content

Embed capabilities

***Control* *all visual menu actions programmatically***

Personalize reports with Themes API

Clone visual API

Automation & life-cycle management

Use Power BI API with service principal (Preview)

We’re thrilled to announce the support of authenticating to Power BI with service principal (also known as app-only authentication), now available in Public Preview.

Service principal can replace master user and help customers build a more robust solution when going to production:

Easier to create – applications can be registered automatically, and anyone with the appropriate permissions can add the new application to a security group allowed to use service principal.
No need to purchase a Power BI Pro license for a service principal (though it is recommended to have a user with Pro license who can access Power BI portal).

Read more about service principal in the blog announcement.

Schedule refresh API

Power BI enables Dataset owners to configure the refresh schedule. The refresh schedule refreshes the data according to the specified time and frequency. Learn more on configuring scheduled refresh.

The new REST API enables you to set a new refresh schedule or override the configuration of an existing schedule. You can also retrieve the schedule of a dataset with ‘get schedule refresh’ API.

This API is very useful for setting or updating schedules on many datasets because you can use a script rather than configuring each manually. The API can also be useful if you want to make automatic changes according to a specific trigger. For example, multiple refresh failures will disable the scheduled refresh. With the new API, you can enable the refresh schedule again without the need to do it manually.

Please note that this API is relevant for cached (import mode) or composite models only.

Schedule DirectQuery cache refresh

For datasets connected in a DirectQuery or Live Connection to the data source. However, Dashboard tiles pinned from reports that use DirectQuery, still cache the data and refresh it in a defined frequency. Now, you can use REST API to set the cache refresh of a DirectQuery or a live connection dataset.

Get Power BI Apps content

We added a new set of APIs that enable the users to get a list of their Power BI installed apps and their content. For now, the content includes only dashboards and reports.

Embed capabilities

Control all visual menu actions programmatically

Options and Context Menus APIs has been extended to provide full control for each visual in the report on built-in commands, and custom commands. Built-in commands can be hidden, or greyed-out per visual and the position of custom commands in the menus can be controlled as well.

Read more about it here and use the new ‘Insight to action’ showcase in the Microsoft Power BI Embedded Playground to experience the new feature.

Personalize reports with Themes API

Themes API allows you to apply a custom theme to your embedded report, such as corporate colors, seasonal coloring, or other custom styles. The custom theme can be defined using a JSON file like in the Power BI Service, and be applied when the report is loaded or changed in a loaded report.

Read more about it here and use the new ‘Personalize report design’ showcase in the Microsoft Power BI Embedded Playground to experience the new feature and get the code to implement it.

Clone visual API

Clone visual API allows you to make copies of an existing visual. It’s helpful when you want to create copies of one visual with different filters or different layout. It allows you also to bring visuals from another page of the report to the currently active page.

Come and meet us!

Meet Power BI embedded analytics Product group in the following conferences:

1. DeveloperWeek– We have a booth and a dedicated session on Power BI Embedded analytics

2 . Power Platform Summit– 2 hours deep-dive session

If you are puzzled or run into a few issues, be sure to check our resources that can help you get by:

‘Troubleshooting’ doc to help you get by all the obstacles on your way for building a great app.
FAQ doc to answer all your question regarding the Product, licensing and Azure capacities.
Community forum for developers, to seek answers or ask any other questions you have.

Custom Visuals Rendering Events API

The 2.3 API introduces a new rendering events service providing the custom visual developer an ability to notify about rendering progress.

Use this API to ensure timely export to PPT and PDF execution of your visual.

This API improves the liability of the export to PPT and PDF features.

Future certification of custom visuals will require proper use of those rendering APIs, and please start using them if your visual is certified.

The new API contains three methods (started, finished or failed):

When the rendering is only going to start, the custom visual code calls to to indicate that rendering process was started.

If the rendering were completed successfully, the custom visual code immediately calls the renderingFinished method notifying the listeners that this visual image is ready.

In case that a problem occurred during the rendering process, preventing the custom visual to successfully complete it, the custom visual code will call to renderingFailed method notifying the listener that the rendering process didn’t complete and also will provide an optional string for the cause of failure.

declare module powerbi.extensibility.v020300 {

export interface IVisualHost extends extensibility.IVisualHost {

…

eventService: IVisualEventService ;

…

}

/**

* An interface for reporting rendering events

export interface IVisualEventService {

/**

* Should be called just before the actual rendering was started.

* Usually at the very start of the update method.

* @param options – the visual update options received as update parameter

renderingStarted(options: VisualUpdateOptions): void;

/**

* Should be called immediately after finishing successful rendering.

* @param options – the visual update options received as update parameter

renderingFinished(options: VisualUpdateOptions): void;

/**

* Called when rendering failed with optional reason string

* @param options – the visual update options received as update parameter

* @param reason – the option failure reason string

renderingFailed(options: VisualUpdateOptions, reason?: string): void;

}

Local storage API

With the new Local Storage API, custom visual can request the host to save or load data from the browser’s storage.

Note that there is a separation of storage access, so that only visuals of the same type can access the data stored.

For more information, please check here.

declare module powerbi.extensibility.v020200 {
export interface IVisualHost extends extensibility.IVisualHost {

…

storageService: ILocalVisualStorageService;

…

}

/**

* Provides an access to local storage for read / write access

interface ILocalVisualStorageService {

/**

* Returns promise that resolves to the data associated with ‘key’ if it was found or rejects otherwise.

* @param key – the name of the payload to retrieve

* @returns the promise that resolves to the data required or rejects if it wasn’t found

get(key: string): IPromise<string>;

/**

* Saves the data to local storage. This data can be later be retrieved using the ‘key’.

* Returns a promise that resolves to the amount of free space available to the caller after the save if there

* is any or rejects otherwise.

* @param key – the name of the payload to store

* @param data – the payload string to store

* @returns the promise resolves to the amount of free space available or rejects if there is no free space to store the data

set(key: string, data: string): IPromise<number>;

/**

* Deletes data associated with ‘key’ from local storage.

* @param key – the name of the payload to remove

remove(key: string): void;

}

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As always, feel free to use all the communication channels at your disposal to connect with our team, share your thoughts and ask questions:

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