Power BI Guidance

A picture is worth a thousand word. Especially, when you need to take a data driven decision. In today’s business world we are surrounded by mammoth amount of data. It is critical for the business to process this data quickly and report it in a way which can be easily consumed and understood. That’s where the Power BI helps the businesses.

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize, and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Power BI consists of:

• A Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop.
• An online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the Power BI service.
• Power BI mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices.
• Power BI Report Server

How you use Power BI can be based on which feature or service of Power BI is the best tool for your role/situation. In this article, I tried to demystify which Power BI product is best suited for your organization as well as for your role.

A common flow of work in Power BI begins by connecting to data sources and building a report in Power BI Desktop. You then publish that report from Power BI Desktop to the Power BI service, and share it so end users in the Power BI service and mobile devices can view and interact with the report. This workflow is common and shows how the three main Power BI elements complement one another.

Power BI Desktop is a complete data analysis and report creation tool that you install for free on your local computer. It includes the Query Editor, in which you can connect to many different sources of data and combine them (often called modeling) into a data model. Then you design a report based on that data model. I recommend reading this article to learn more about Power BI Desktop.

Power BI Service is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to help you create, share, and consume business insights in the way that serves you and your business most effectively. The Microsoft Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), sometimes referred to as Power BI online, is the SaaS ( Software as a Service) part of Power BI.

Power BI service has three separate editions available to you.

1. Power BI Premium to get dedicated and enhanced resources for your organization, so users in your organization can use the Power BI service with better performance and responsiveness. Power BI Premium is a tenant-level Microsoft 365 subscription available in two SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit) families: P SKU (P1-P5) and EM SKUs (EM1-EM3). I recommend reading this article for more information.
2. Power BI Embedded subscription in Azure. There is a single A (A1-A6) SKU family that requires no commitment and is billed hourly for use white labeling Power BI in applications, portals, and websites or as a way to test P or EM capacities. Read this article for information.
3. Power BI Pro is an individual user license that lets users read and interact with reports and dashboards that others have published to the Power BI service. Users with this license type can share content and collaborate with other Power BI Pro users. Only Power BI Pro users can publish or share content with other users or consume content that’s created by others unless a Power BI Premium capacity hosts that content.

While Power BI provides several options for your business it is critical for you choose the right option. The following table will help you to choose the right option for your business. (apologies for the small fonts, LinkedIn doesn’t allow me to paste table in the article, so I pasted table image).

But what if you’re not ready to move to the cloud, and need to keep your reports behind a corporate firewall? You can create, deploy, and manage Power BI mobile and paginated reports on premises with the range of ready-to-use tools and services that Power BI Report Server provides.

Power BI Report Server is a solution that you deploy behind your firewall and then deliver your reports to the right users in different ways, whether that’s viewing them in a web browser, on a mobile device, or as an email. And because Power BI Report Server is compatible with Power BI in the cloud, you can move to the cloud when you’re ready.

Disclaimer: I work for @Microsoft Azure Cloud & my opinions are my own.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.