Power BI in SharePoint Online

I am very excited after Microsoft released Power BI GA (general availability) at the end of July. It comes with list of impressive new features which is explained in detail in this MSDN article.
I want my blog readers to know what is Power BI and how it can be used with SharePoint Online to leverage the BI capabilities of SharePoint. Let's learn the basics in this article.
Articles in SharePoint Business Intelligence (BI) Series:

Power BI in SharePoint Online
Creating reports using OData Feed in Power BI
Power View report in SharePoint
Display Power BI reports in SharePoint Online

Microsoft came with a new tool for BI for the following reasons:

1. Use the known tool  - Excel
2. Discover More  - Power Query
3. Analyze More – Power Pivot
4. Visualize  - Power View / Power Map
5. Combine with Office 365 – share with any one
6. Power BI sites – collaborate and share the data sets with your team
7. Dive into Q & A – ask a question and get answers visually
8. Stay Connected – Mobile Apps
9. Schedule data refresh and create security settings easily

So what is Power BI?

1. Cloud based service works with excel to provide users a complete self-service BI solution
2. Available in SharePoint & Excel 2013 Online (available only in E3 / E4 subscription)
3. With Power BI, you can easily deploy a cloud based BI environment for users to share insights, collaborate and access reports from anywhere on any device
4. With Power BI for Office 365, you can easily setup an online gallery for users to share insights
5. Mobile apps available in Apple store, Windows store & Google play store

How does Power BI differ from SharePoint BI?
 

Feature	Power BI	SharePoint BI
Content Viewing	It displays all document libraries with a preview to reports / dashboards	It displays only pivot gallery document library
Natural Language	Q & A provides the end user to search for data with your questions and it displays the results in visualization	No such option available
Workbook as a data source	Power BI the data model and the reports (created with Excel pivot tables + charts, or Power View for Excel) everything must be contained within a single .xlsx file	In SharePoint, we can upload a Power Pivot model to the Power Pivot Gallery and other reports can connect to it using a URL-based connection string. This works for Power View for SharePoint, Reporting Services, PerformancePoint, and Excel
Data Refresh Option	It is simpler for end users to manage the data refresh	Lot of options available for data refresh and it’s controlled by Admin
Data Management Gateway	It is a hybrid environment (partially cloud based and partially on premises)	No data management gateway available
Data rendering option	HTML 5 (hence cross platform support)	Silverlight for data preview
Maximum workbook size	Max is 250MB	2 GB
Security	Sign in with Organization ID (O365 ID)	AD security mechanism
Enterprise Search for data	Search query is the important feature and it can search public and data within organization	N/A
Mobile Application	Available in Microsoft, Apple and Google Play store	N/A

            
Where can I download the Power BI and related products?

1. Sign up for Power BI
2. Power BI for desktop
3. Power BI Analysis Services Connector
4. Power BI Business Gateway
5. Power BI Apps for mobile (apps for Apple, Microsoft and Android mobile)
6. Power BI pricing

Hope this article, gives an idea of Power BI and how it differs from SharePoint BI. I will explain about connecting data from different data sources, creating dashboards, reports, etc. with Power BI in the coming articles.
Hope this helps you! Please share you comments since it helps me write more. Also, share this post to your friends via the networks below.  

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Power Query and Power Map in Excel 2013

As you all know, Microsoft is improving the BI capabilities with a lot of new features with exciting releases in the year 2015. Microsoft has introduced new add-ins called Power Query and Power Map for Excel 2013.
Believe me guys, this is really awesome add-ins which taken the Microsoft's BI capabilities one step ahead of all other BI competitors!
Let's try to create a power map by searching a public data using power query in Excel 2013 in this article.
Before trying a sample, let's understand what is power query and power map for excel 2013 and it's download links:
Power Query:

• Microsoft Power Query for Excel (a data analysis tool) is an Excel add-in that enhances the self-service Business Intelligence experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery, combine, refine, access and collaborate.
• Power Query supports importing data from a wide range of Web sources, including scrapping tables from HTML pages, as well as importing data from Web APIs. Power Query supports XML, JSON and OData formats
• It includes intuitive discovery features, a powerful query language, and a built-in ability to share your discoveries with others

Power Map:

• Power Map provides interactive, 3D visualization with geospatial and temporal data
• It enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through
• rich, 3D visualization on a globe with fluidic appearance & guided cinematic tours
• seeing time-stamped data change over time (which you might not have seen in traditional 2D tables and charts) and to share it with others
• you can create a video tour easily in a single click
• Geo flow is another feature which shows how the
• data changed over a period of time

Excel Add-in Links:

1. Power Query for Excel 2013
2. Power Map for Excel 2013

Creating a Power Map with GeoFlow:
Let's add a public data from internet by using Power Query - connecting data from the existing excel file.
I have downloaded the U.S. Operable Generating Units in the United States by State and Energy Source, 2011 from the link. Thank you for the data!
Open the excel 2013 -> Power Query tab -> Get External Data -> From Excel

This will open the query editor where you can select the data sets (this downloaded excel sheet has various tabs with different power sources). You can combine the data using Power Query data editor as well.
Let's select only "Coal" worksheet, delete the unwanted columns and create a date column using initial month and year (which is required for showing the growth of coal energy plants across U.S by county in power map) as shown below:

Now, click Insert Map -> Power Map option in the excel file -> Power Map will load the data source and it should automatically detect the geo-location fields from the dataset.

I have created two types of visualizations, one which is heat map visualization which will show the coal power generated in U.S. by state as shown below:

 The other one is coal power generated in U.S. by county with a time by using Initial Month of Operation column as shown below:

    

Power Map gives the options of creating video tour in a single click from the menu. Here is the video, I created from this sample:

Cool, isn't it?
Thanks for reading! Don't forgot to share this post and post your valuable comments which will make me write more. 

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Get set, update!!!! Windows 10 is here

I am feeling excited to see the Windows 10 upgrade is started!!!

Rock and Roll !!! Will update you all soon about the features and my first experience after the update!

Update running from Windows 8.1 OS.

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Create Business Intelligence Center in Office 365

Recently, Microsoft has updated Power BI features in SharePoint online. It has enhanced the Business Intelligence features a lot and I am sure self-service BI is the ultimate goal for Microsoft:) In this article, we will learn how to create Business Intelligence Center in Office 365.
To get  Microsoft Office 365 trail with Business Intelligence Center (this feature is not available in all the versions of the O 365), you need to sign up using the E3 license. This includes the advanced features in it.
Office 365 Enterprise E3 
Once you sign up, navigate to Office 365 admin center -> Admin -> SharePoint -> It will open the SharePoint administration

Click Site Collections -> New -> Private Site Collection -> Give the Title and Web Site Address -> Template Selection -> Enterprise tab -> Business Intelligence Center ->  Enter the site collection Admin and click OK to create it.

You will see the new BI site collection as shown below:

Soon, will post about creating dashboards and reports in SharePoint 2013. Happy Learning!

Please share this post if this helps you!

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Get Windows 10 from Windows 8.1

I know everyone is excited and waiting for the 29th of July, 2015 for Windows 10 upgrade which is FREE  :)

I have Windows 8.1 version in my system.

Points to be noted for getting Windows 10 FREE upgrade from Windows 8.1:

1. You should have a licensed version of Windows OS installed.
2. You should have all the latest updates of Windows installed successfully
3. When you have all the latest updates installed, you will automatically see an Windows 10 icon in the task bar as shown below:

4. When you click on the icon, you see an pop up window showing the steps to get Windows 10 as shown below:

5. When you click on the blue icon on the left top corner, you will see various menus -> click View Confirmation under Getting the upgrade:

                                   

Here you can enter your email ID associated with Windows Account to reserve your Windows 10 for free :)

You should see a screen as shown below if your Windows 10 copy is reserved:

According to Microsoft's latest press release, it is going to be LIFETIME FREE!!!!

Learn more on Windows 10 Update: Link

Read Windows 10 Features: Link

Please share this post if this helps you!

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Could not load type ‘Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SpAddin.ReportGallery.ReportGalleryView’

Recently, I have installed the power pivot in SharePoint 2013 and then configured the power pivot service application in the Central Administration.

I tried creating a Pivot Gallery and it is successful. When I opened the pivot gallery library, it is showing the below error: 

I am sure some feature is not activated but couldn’t find it. Then, checked the Central Administration -> System Settings -> Manage Farm Solutions -> powerpivotwebapplicationsolution

This solution should be deployed to the web application in which have created the pivot gallery.

Happy learning! Please share this post if it helps you!

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SharePoint 2013 / Office 365

I wanted to try some proof of concepts using SharePoint 2013 and been looking for various easy options to get the SP 2013.
Hence I wanted to list the easy ways to get SharePoint 2013 for the readers. Below is the list:

Office 365 Trial :

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans

On-Premises Deployment:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-sharepoint-server-2013

Windows Azure:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/?CR_CC=200256621&WT.mc_id=A24158309 

SharePoint Online:

https://products.office.com/en-us/SharePoint/compare-sharepoint-plans?legRedir=true&CorrelationId=08d4bcac-2e4e-4269-9981-1deb00da1ad9

SharePoint Rackspace:

http://sharepoint.rackspace.com/free-sharepoint-2013#chat 

Cloud Share:

http://www.cloudshare.com/cloudshare-template-library

This are the some of the easier ways to get the trial versions for SharePoint 2013. Please share this post if this is helpful. Happy Sharing!

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External List in SharePoint Limitations

When I tried to connect the external DB to the SharePoint using external content types, I found lot of issues or limitations for the end users. This is same in external lists as well. I am using SharePoint 2010.

No look up:

Unfortunately the only thing that you can do a look up on in an external list is on the ID column, anything else and you are out of luck.

No Attachments:

Attachments options are not available.

No RSS Feeds:

RSS feeds is also greyed out and it really helps when you need updates from SharePoint list

No Workflows:

Workflows are very important in SharePoint lists and it plays a vital role in different business requirements. But workflows are disabled in external lists

No Ratings:

In all the SharePoint lists, you will see an option of Rating Settings under General Settings where the Rating can be enabled but this is disabled
No Inline Editing or Datasheet View:
Inline editing allows you to edit list items in list view itself. Datasheet view is a where you can easily change the data for multiple items. Neither of these is available.

No Versioning or history:
You cannot see version history for an External List. It does make sense, in many of the external systems there is no concepts of version
No Item Level Permissions:
You cannot configure item level permissions for external list items
No Export to Excel Option:
This is a frequently used option which allows the end users to export the list data to excel. But this is disabled
No Open with Access / Create Visio Diagram / Open Schedule: 
Though this not used frequently, sometimes we may need this but this is also disabled

I gone through BCS in SP 2013, it is improved a little bit:

1. Export to Excel option is included
2. Sorting and Filtering are improved
3. Event receiver on external lists is introduced

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Update on InfoPath and SharePoint forms

As part of the update shared around the Evolution of SharePoint and the next SharePoint Server on-premises release, we are also updating the timelines for removal of InfoPath Forms Services components of SharePoint and SharePoint Online. Specifically, InfoPath Forms Services will be included in the next on-premises release of SharePoint Server 2016, as well as being fully supported in Office 365 until further notice. Customers will be able to confidently migrate to SharePoint Server 2016 knowing that their InfoPath forms will continue to work in their on-premises environments, as well as in Office 365. 

The InfoPath 2013 application remains the last version to be released and will work with SharePoint Server 2016.

Ref : http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/31/update-on-infopath-and-sharepoint-forms/ 

This gives answer for many migration questions with regard to InfoPath forms in SharePoint lower versions.

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OWA web parts in SharePoint 2013

When I tried finding the OWA web parts in the SharePoint 2013 OOTB web parts, I couldn't find the web parts and “Outlook Web App” category is also not available. I was thinking it is deprecated or not available in SharePoint 

2013.

After searching, I found the following solution.

Steps to add Outlook web parts

1.   Go to Web part Gallery.

2.   On Web part Gallery page, Click Files-> New Document -> New in the ribbon.

 3.   On New web part page (NewDWp.aspx), look for Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.OWA, select the web parts related to the outlook as shown below and populate gallery.

4.   Now, under Miscellaneous Category, you will see the web parts related to Outlook. 

Hope this helps you!

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