Enterprise deployment considerations for Power BI with Dynamics 365 online

This is part-4 of a multi-series blog on Power BI and Dynamics 365. The earlier blogs are on integrating Power BI with Dynamics 365 (Part-1), the Power BI Desktop (Part-2) and Data Insights (Part-3). This blogs focuses on deployments considerations for Power BI with Dynamics 365 online. It compares 3 deployment approach taking into cognizance the Enterprise environment and data culture.

Power BI deployment scenario with Dynamics 365 online -

Before we delve into deployment approach options let’s look at how Power BI will be typically deployed with Dynamics 365 online.

Power BI deployment with Dynamics 365 online

 1. Data sourcing - Here the source of data is Microsoft Dynamics 365 online which can be ingested into Power BI. It can be further enhanced with data from other data sources, online or on premise using a data gateway.

2. Datasets and reports - The data modelling, enhancements and reports are created using Power BI Desktop. They are then published into PowerBI.com online service and on mobile applications.

3. Dashboard and Data Insights - The dashboards are created in PowerBI.com PowerBI.com also allows users to get quick insights from their data using algorithms developed by Microsoft. The data insights visuals can also be added to the dashboards.

The dashboard can be brought into Dynamics 365 as a personal dashboard and shared with other users within Dynamics 365.

Considerations for Power BI deployment -

There are many factors to consider when deploying Power BI in an Enterprise environment. If it is to be used in conjunction with Dynamics 365 online, as an analytical reporting tool we need to include additional considerations. The enterprise environment and data culture also impact the deployment approach. 

1. Security –

Dynamics 365 has a very granular security model. The structure includes Business units, security roles and teams. User may have access to data based on the security role they have, which business unit they belong to and what teams they are a member of, in addition to any other customization's.

Unfortunately Power BI does not respect any of the security construct within Dynamics 365. Additionally Power BI has its own row level security model which applies to the data set, reports and visualizations that are created in Power BI.

The visualizations developed within Power BI can be integrated and shared with other users who may or may not have access to the original data from within Dynamics 365 online. So it is important to manage the sharing of the visualizations within Power BI and Dynamics 365.

2. Governance

Governance for Power BI with Dynamics 365 applies to the sourcing of data and data storage. Power BI online can get data from within Dynamics 365 online and many other data sources which may or may not be part of the Enterprise data environment. The data from different sources can be combined, modified, enhanced and modelled to generate Reports and visualizations.

In enterprise deployments considerations have to be given to the source of Data. Also any modifications or enhancements made to source data needs to be governed. It is vital for user adoption that the data source is trusted, accurate and follows the Enterprise data management process.

There are limits to the amount of data stored in Power BI and also the size of the Data sets. The limits are dependent on the license type and quantity. Currently the limit is @1GB per data set and 10 GB per user for a Power BI pro license. Enterprise needs to make sure they comply with the licenses and data storage limits. Considerations have to be given to what kind of data is being stored and how long will the data storage is to be maintained.

3. Ownership

The ownership here refers to the responsibility of creating and managing the reports and visualizations.

Business power users have access to both Dynamics 365 and Power BI. They see the day to day business transactions being accumulated within Dynamics 365. They want to analyze and gain quick insights from the transaction data, would like to be able to create their own data model and prepare visualization’s. This will help them in understanding the business better and make decisions to react to the business challenges and ultimately make the business successful.

The Enterprise IT team on the other hand have been managing Dynamics 365 development and deployment. They would similarly like to manage the creation and deployment of Power BI & integration with Dynamics 365. 

The Enterprise IT follows a standardized development process. They want to be able to make data models that can be consumed and re-used with multiple divisions within the Enterprise. They also want to make sure that the reports and visuals adhere to Enterprise formatting guidelines.

It is important to acknowledge and appreciate the differences between business users and IT team efforts and goals. 

In consideration of the above, the following 3 deployment approaches are proposed for Power BI with Dynamics 365. 

1. Business led Power BI deployment – Here the business power users are leading the integration and development of Reports and dashboards using Power BI with Dynamics 365 online. IT is not involved in the management of Power BI reporting. This gives flexibility and agility to business users to create and develop their own datasets, reports and gather insights quickly.

2. Corporate (IT) Power BI deployment – This is the traditional approach where the Corporate IT department gathers the business reporting requirements and provides the business users the reporting and dashboards in Dynamics 365 to consume only. The business users have very little if any, capability of creating their own visuals other than the filters provided in the dashboards. The entire integration, generations and publishing of the reports and dashboards is managed by the IT department.

3. IT managed and business led Power BI deployment – A new approach to Power BI deployment is combination of both IT and business teams to work together. In this approach the data sourcing and governance is managed by IT. The IT team gets the reporting needs from Business. They, using the Power BI desktop and data gateways, integrate and ingest data, develop the data sets, models and reports and create Apps for deployment. The Power BI apps are published to PowerBI.com service and made available to business power users.

Business power users have access to PowerBI.com service and access the Apps published by IT. They can generate / edit the reports, create their own dashboards and get insights from PowerBI.com. They also can import the PowerBI.com dashboard into Dynamics 365 and share with other users.

The deployment approaches are compared below.

#	Description	Business Led Power BI deployment	Corporate (IT) Power BI deployment	IT managed / Business led Power BI deployment
1.	Ownership	Business	Corporate IT	Corporate IT & Business
2.	Data sourcing and Semantic layer	Business	Corporate IT	Corporate IT
3.	Data modelling and reports	Business	Corporate IT	Corporate IT / Business
4.	Dashboard and Insights	Business	Corporate IT	Business
5.	Data Governance	High risk of business users ingesting unqualified data	IT team manages data based on Enterprise guidelines	IT team manages data based on Enterprise guidelines
6.	Security	Risk of business users accessing & sharing sensitive data	IT manages and controls access to data and sharing	IT manages and controls access to data and sharing
7.	Agility and speed – Turnaround time	Faster turnaround of reports & insights	IT follows the enterprise reporting process. This may incur high turnaround time	IT follows the enterprise reporting process and business get access to generate dashboard and insights
8.	Agile development	Exploratory and non-linear	Traditional and sequential	Traditional and sequential
9.	Development emphasis	Agility, speed and quick turnaround	Safety and security	Safety and security with flexibility

In conclusion there are multiple deployment options and Enterprise IT environment and data culture play a significant role in deployment approach. One approach I would recommend is that the Power BI and Dynamics 365 reporting development can start with Business led exploratory approach and over time transfer to IT Managed or Corporate led deployments.

I hope you enjoyed the blog and do let me know your comments. 

Thanks for reading

Mihir Shah

365withoutcode

Reference -
1. Microsoft whitepaper - Planning a Power BI Enterprise deployment (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/whitepapers)

Analytics using Power BI with Dynamics 365 - Part-3 - Data Insights

This is part-3 of a multi-series blog on Power BI and Dynamics 365. The earlier blogs are on integrating Power BI with Dynamics 365 (Part-1) and the Power BI Desktop (Part-2). This blogs focuses on data insights from Power BI with Dynamics 365.

Once you have integrated Power BI with Dynamics 365 and built your data-sets it is ready for you to get insights on your Dynamics 365 data. Microsoft research has developed advanced analytical algorithms to enable for getting quick insights from your data without having to write any code. 

It also helps to be able to quickly analyze your data without missing any significant insight. 

Below are some of the insights that I got using the sample data sets for Sales Analytics and Customer Service Analytics with Dynamics 365 and Power BI.

Email and Web are the dominant origins for Cases

Most of the Cases are questions and not problems

Cases are resolved mostly in the middle of the month

You can pin the insight to an existing or a new dashboard.

You can also expand the insight visual which opens the visual into a Focus mode. You can filter the visual in focus mode to get to the data insight you want as shown below.

Pin to a dashboard or Get further insights on this visual

Also you can get further insights on the data within the insight visual only. This is scoped insights as the data is now restricted to the visual only and not the entire data set.

Note – The insights is only possible on data uploaded to Power BI. It will not work on Direct Query.

How to get quick insights? -

In Power BI online go to My workspace > Dataset. Select your specific data set and click on the … (ellipses) in the Actions column. Than click on “Get Quick Insights” option as shown below.

Insights from a Dataset in Power BI

Now Power BI will start analyzing your data and building the insights for you. Once done it will let you know that your insights are ready for viewing.

Hope this helps you get started with getting the insights from your data. In my next blog I will write about the types of insights that you can get using Power BI and Dynamics 365.

Mihir Shah

365WithoutCode

Analytics using Power BI & Dynamics 365 - Part-2 The Desktop

This is a part of my multi-series blog about analytics with Power BI and D365. Part-1 of the blog is here. This blog focuses on Power BI Desktop.

In order to gain insights from data it is imperative for users to be able to easily create their own visuals and do as needed analytics. Power BI Desktop allows you to connect, create and publish the analysis, reports and visualizations. 

Below is an example of a custom dashboard I created using Power BI desktop & Dynamics 365 Sales. 

The pie charts on top show the Opportunity and Cases breakdown by Account. This information may not be seen as valuable. Now in the bottom are line and bar charts, where I have combined the data and am able to gain some valuable insights.

1. There are few accounts which have good opportunity pipeline and also have high # of cases open for them. So I can ask my customer service and sales team to work together to make sure the open cases are resolved on priority. 
2. There are few high opportunity accounts with no activities, so there is not much communication going on with those accounts. This is a flag and I would ask the Sales associate to focus more on those accounts to successfully close the opportunities.

As you can see, using Power BI desktop you can build custom visualizations of your data and get deeper insights which can help you improve your customer engagement. 

The below are the steps to integrate Power BI desktop and Dynamics 365. Assuming you have already created a Power BI account and have an instance of Dynamics 365 online ready.

1.        Download and install Power BI desktop from here.
2.        Open Power BI desktop and select Get Data, click on more and select online services and double click on Dynamics 365 online

   

   3.   In the Web API url enter the service root url (you can copy from Dynamics 365 - settings > customization's > developer resources). Remember to change the v9.0 to v8.1 (this may be temporary till Power BI connects with v9.0) 

4.  Use the Organization account to connect to the Dynamics 365 instance.

5.  Once connected, the Navigator window will open and it will load the entities. Select the entity you want to include and click Load.

6.   This brings the entity and its relationship along with the data into the desktop. This may take time if you have large amount of data.

Now you can start creating the visuals and reports. Once done you can save the report and also publish the same to PowerBI.com

Things to note –

• Recent sources will save the connection info, so you don’t need to do all the steps again
• Once the report is published to PowerBI.com you can create dashboards and share the same with other users

Hope the above gets you started using Power BI desktop with Dynamics 365. Thanks for reading.

Mihir Shah

365WithoutCode

Analytics using Power BI with Dynamics 365

As the usage grows exponentially in Dynamics 365, so does the requirement to analyze the treasure trove of data. Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool that can be used by business users along with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to get insights on data, visualize trends and take actions.

This blog is part-1 of multi-series blog detailing Power BI analytics with Dynamics 365. This blog focuses on the integration of Power BI with Dynamics 365 online.

Power BI is a set of business analytics tools that enables users to connect, analyze, visualize and get insights from data. Power BI Service is used to connect to and integrate with Dynamics 365 online.

A customer service Power BI dashboard with the Dynamics 365 sample data is shown below – 

Customer Service dashboard - Power BI

     To set-up and integrate Power BI with Dynamics 365 - 

1.       Pre-requisite -  You will need Dynamics 365 online and Power BI subscription. For this blog I created a demo for Dynamics 365 online and also a trial for Power BI. I assigned the licenses for both the subscriptions to my users. 

Licenses for Power BI / Dynamics 365

Note – The subscriptions for both products are in the same tenant for this blog.

      2.  Set-up Power BI – Login to PowerBI.com and add the content packs. Microsoft has provided few Power BI content packs on Microsoft app source to use with Dynamics 365 – Customer Engagement. For example - 

•       Sales analytics for Dynamics 365
•       Customer Service analytics for Dynamics 365
•       Microsoft Dynamics 365 process analyzer

       3. To get the content pack into Power BI –

•       In Power BI, click on Get Data
• ·        Select Microsoft Appsource > Services
• ·        Search the content packs and click – get it now
•       Login to the Dynamics 365 online 

Now you should be able to see the content pack in Power BI

       Once the content packs are loaded in Power BI you can see the interactive dashboards                           and visualization of Dynamics 365 data in PowerBI.com.

Now we can connect to Power BI and get the tiles and dashboards to show in Dynamics 365.

       4. In Dynamics 365 Go to System Settings > Reporting Tab and allow Power BI embedding

5.  Now you can create a Personal dashboard, charts and views using Power BI tiles as below. 

Custom dashboard using Power BI tiles

Note - 

1. Power BI tiles cannot be used with System dashboards. You can share the personal dashboard created in Dynamics 365 with other users or teams

Hope the above helps you to get started with analytics with Power BI and Dynamics 365.

      Thanks for reading

     Mihir Shah

     Dynamics365WithoutCode

New in Dynamics 365 v9.0 - Multi-select option set, Virtual entities & Flow

This blog is the part of a multi-series blog on the latest updates in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement v9.0. The Part-1 on User Experience enhancement is here and Part-2 on Apps enhancements is here.

This blog is about the following new features in v9.0 –

1

•        Multi-select Option sets
•        Virtual entities 
•        Microsoft Flow integration

1.      Multi-select Option set – This was one of the most requested and long awaited features which customers asked for in Microsoft Dynamics 365.

When you are creating a new custom field for an entity. there is a new field type – Multi-select option set.  For example, I am creating a new field for Contact – Hobbies. This is a multi-select option set as each contact can have more than 1 hobby.

Multi-Select Option Set

After creating the new field I can add a list (options) of Hobbies for the Contact.

Hobbies - Multi-select

Now add the custom field to the Contact form and you have a multiple choice for Hobbies to select for a contact.

Add multiple Hobbies for a Contact

And once you select all Hobbies for the contact the data looks great. Thank you Microsoft Dynamics 365 product team!!

Nice work!!

Some of the things to know about Multi-select option sets –

1.         You can enter upto 150 options max in the list
2.            Multi-select option set can also be a Global Option set (I recommend all Option sets should be  Global Option sets) so it can be used across the board with Multiple entities - For example Hobbies for Leads and Contacts
3.           You can also add the multi-select option set to a view as shown below

Multiple Hobbies in a Contact View

    

Now it is time to plan for the data transformation - Moving data from custom entities created before multi-select was available, to the new multi-select option set.

2. Virtual Entities –

      Clients have data stored in multiple external systems, applications and databases. It is useful to show the data from external systems in Dynamics 365 and not to import or replicate the data. This is where the new feature of Virtual entities will be beneficial.

      For example Virtual entities provide the ability to connect to an ERP database and show the necessary information for Customer Order status or Account status, payments and receivables information.

Steps to create a Virtual entity –

1. Create a Data Source – Settings > Administration > Virtual Entity Data Sources

2. Enter the necessary information – Note – Currently this support Odata v4.0 only

Data source for Virtual Entity

Once the data source is created you can create the custom Virtual entity and refer the above Data Source.

New Virtual Entity - checkbox

The Virtual entity now can be used in Dynamics 365. Some points to consider about Virtual Entities –

1. -        Virtual entities are read only
2. -        Currently it supports OData v4.0 service
3. -        You cannot trigger workflows or plugins with the data retrieved from Virtual entities, as the data is not stored
4. -        Only organization owned entities are supported
5. -        Field level security is not supported with Virtual entities
6. -        The external data source entities must have a GUID primary key

3.  Microsoft Flow  – A user can now create or edit a flow from within Dynamics.

The flow button is available from a list view or record form – For example on the active Account list view the following flow options are available.

Flow in Dynamics 365

It requires the user to have an account and login to Flow. Once logged into Flow, they can create a new flow, manage all the created flows and see the run history of the flows.

I have few concerns with the Flow integration –

1.      Flow is useful for a system admin to create integrations between Dynamics 365 and 1 or more external application. For any internal to Dynamics 365 processes I would prefer to use Workflows or Actions within Dynamics 365

2.      There is no Global setting or configuration in security role within Dynamics 365 to control which user/s can use Flow. I think this is a security flaw and it may require admins to disable the flow button for all users except the few who can and should be allowed to create flow

3.      There is a cost to the Flow runs and it needs to be compared with other options

I hope the above is useful for you and let me know your observations on the above.

Thanks for reading.

Mihir Shah
365WithoutCode

New in Dynamics 365 v9.0 - Apps Enhancement

This blog is part-2 of a multi-series blog which focuses on the new enhancements to Dynamics 365 (v9.0) Customer Engagement application. 

The Part-2 of this blog is on Apps enhancements. You can read the Part-1 - enhancements to the User Experience here. With this release Microsoft is moving to an Apps based application development and consumption model and I get the feeling that everything is in Apps and App is everything.

1. Apps  - Introduced in Dec’2016 update is further enhanced and it is now the default way to create unique user interface and experiences. I had a blog earlier which details how the app is designed and you can read it here.

Here is how the new Tier-1 Customer Service dashboard looks like – 

Fig-1: new Tier-1 Dashboard

Below is the app designer. When creating a new App you can copy from an existing app and all the components gets copied over.

Fig-2 – App designer

2.  App Type - Microsoft has 9 OOTB managed apps as listed below. The Apps can be differentiated into 2 types based on the Client type.

Fig-3 – App Client Type

The table below shows all the managed apps with client type. (Note - I am using a trial version for this blog)

Table-1: OOTB managed Apps with Client Type

Note – All the apps above are accessing the same instance (and hence the same data) of Dynamics 365.

Microsoft has provided recommendation for the interface for some of the managed app based on performance results.

Table-2: App recommendation for best performance

 3.       Unified Interface – This is a new design framework applicable to all new Apps. It is created to  provide an “optimal viewing and interaction experience for any screen size, device or orientation”.

The new Sales Hub, Customer Service Hub and new mobile app are based on the Unified Interface. 

Here is how the new Customer Service Hub app dashboards looks like – (note – I am using the Custom time Frame to change the date range)

Fig-4: Tier-1 dashboard with Visual Filters

Fig-5: Tier – 1 Dashboard

The Case form – The unified interface changes can be better appreciated when we look at the form design changes in the Case form.

·        It has the new Timeline feature.

·        The tabs are now on the top – Summary / Details / ….

·        The time is now shown (16 D) in the business process flow stage

·        When clicking on the stage (example – Identify) it will show you the steps in that stage

Fig-6: The new Case form design

4.         Security – Apps can be secured by limiting the security roles that have access to the apps. 

Go to the Custom App and within the custom app go to Settings > My Apps.

Select the App you want to secure the access to and click on the “…” and select ‘Manage Roles’

In summary, some of the points to consider when designing with Apps.

1

•       Create a new app from an existing managed app. This will copy all the components within the Managed apps
•       Secure the access to the app and provide a user friendly url
•       Follow the recommendation for performance from Microsoft
•       Some of the new features like timeline view is only available in the unified interface app

Hope the above helps you to jump start using the new Apps within Dynamics 365. Do let me know if there are any new feature which you like or dislike. Thanks for reading.

Mihir Shah

365WithoutCode