With Microsoft Ignite happening this week there have been a whole host of announcements to Power BI which is great to see. So please read below for all the additional updates and details.

Power BI – Enterprise Capabilities for Power BI

There have been quite a few announcements that have been released with regards to the Enterprise Capabilities for Power which are listed below.

Power BI Premium

Whilst when Power BI Premium was released there was some additional capability announced, there are now more details of what is going to be relased.

  • One-click scale up – This enables a one click scenario to scale up resources. This will be available this week.
  • Larger Capacity Nodes – This will allow for larger premium capacity. This will become available in October 2017
  • Support for Larger Models – This is in association with the larger capacity nodes in which there it is possible to host datasets 10X larger than previously possible which was 1GB. This will become available in October 2017
  • Availability for US Government and US Department of Defense – This allows the US Government departments to utilize Power BI Premium. This will become available in October 2017

Power BI Premium as well as Power BI Pro

The details below apply for both Power BI Premium, as well as for those users who have a Power BI Pro License

  • External distribution of Power BI Apps – This will allow users to distribute Apps to external customers, suppliers etc. This is as you could do in the past with sharing Dashboards externally with customers or suppliers. This will become available in October 2017
  • Push Power BI Apps to users – There will be the capability to push published Apps to users, so that when they log in they have the App across any device. This will become available in October 2017
  • Regional Auditing – From my understanding what this means is that now all Power BI Audit logs will be stored within your region. Which will enable compliance for certain organizations who require all their data to be located in their region. This will become available in October 2017
  • Data Lineage Tools – There is going to be a data lineage solution template which will allow your organization to understand the downstream use of data, compliance, performance and loading of loading data. This will become available in October 2017

Power BI Desktop in the Windows Store

As you can see with the image above, available now you can get Power BI Desktop from the Windows store.

What this allows is now the following:

  • No requirement for an Administrator installation
  • Seamless upgrades to Power BI Desktop for users. Which also provides relief for IT departments to manage the Power BI Desktop installation.
  • Users will always be on the latest version so can always leverage the monthly updates to Power BI

Partner Network updates

There has been an update to the ESRI partner update, where now there is a new Plus subscription for ArcGIS maps for Power BI. This will enabled additional features such as more maps, global demographics and more.

Power BI Embedded on Azure

Finally, in this release of updates coming in October you can now use Power BI Embedded in Azure.

This will allow the following Azure capabilities to be leveraged

  • New SKU Pricing for Power BI Embedded on Azure
  • Per Hour billing
  • Scale up or scale down
  • Stop, Start or Pause
  • Use of all other Azure capabilities

The blog post details are here: Power BI at Ignite 2017: announcing enterprise-ready capabilities for establishing data culture at scale

Power BI – Premium Click Through Demo

There now is a great way to use the click through demo for Power BI Premium to get a better understanding of how it all works.

You can access the link here: Power BI Premium Click Through Demo

Power BI – Campaign/Brand Management for Facebook

I am not 100% sure if I had highlighted this before, but there is now a solution template to monitor Facebook Campaign and Brand Management.

This will utilize your existing Azure subscription and will enable your organization to quickly and easily view your Facebook data.

You can find more details here: Campaign/Brand Management for Facebook

Power BI Report Server – Roadmap

As you can see above what we can look forward to in Power BI Report server in Q4 update. From the list below this will assist a lot of organizations who want to leverage Power BI On-Premise and have as much functionality as there currently is in the Power BI Service.

  • Scheduled data refreshing for PBIX files.
  • DirectQuery support.
  • Larger file support – Not sure how large but at least it is larger than the current 50MB
  • Public REST API – This should be interesting to see what you can leverage.
  • SharePoint Webpart – This looks to support RDL Reports.

Power BI – Understanding the Power BI Embedded SKUs

In the link below is a great blog post by John White, where he goes into detail to explain the 3 different Power BI embedded SKUs.

It has some great information so based on your requirement there are details around which SKU is right for you.

You can find the blog post here: Understanding the Power BI Capacity Based SKUs

SQL Server 2017

At the Microsoft Ignite conference there was an announcement that SQL Server 2017 will be released on 02 October 2017.

There are some great new features that they have put into SQL Server 2017.

For more details please find the link here: SQL Server 2017