Create a more Data Driven Collaboration with the Power BI app for Microsoft Teams (GA)

How we work has changed considerably – every process and action produce data, individuals and teams are now expected to use that data to make the best possible decisions, and organizations need to enable everyone to participate in data driven decision making.

As many of you that enthusiastically participate in our preview programs know, we’ve been steadily making progress on the Power BI app in Teams program. I’m happy to announce today that the Power BI App for Microsoft Teams is Generally Available.

The simplified and richly integrated Power BI app for Microsoft Teams makes using data easy and approachable for everyone, no matter how skilled.

 

Power BI app for Microsoft Teams

With this availability, users can easily find data in Power BI, use our fully featured experiences without leaving Microsoft Teams, and bring data and insights into their chats, meetings, calendar invites, and of course teams. By making data more accessible, organizations can make it easier than ever to bring teams together, have insights-based discussions at the point of collaboration, and make better decisions faster.

If you’re new to Power BI in Microsoft Teams, watch our Ignite On Demand session to see how these experiences help every individual, team, and organization start making better decisions and taking better actions.

As part of GA, we’ve made a host of enhancements to the app and we’re making it easier to deploy it broadly in your organization through an automatic installation option. We also announced that the Power BI app for Microsoft Teams is coming soon to US Government Clouds. You can start making Power BI available in Teams today by reviewing the available instructions.

 

Enhanced experiences in Power BI in Teams

With GA, we’re excited to announce that we’ve more deeply integrating Power BI with Teams. It starts with a simplified navigation experience designed to help you find and use data faster. For example, it’s now much easier to discover the Power BI goals capability in Teams. When viewing reports and datasets, the left navigation isn’t shown giving users more space to work with their data.

 

We’ve made it easy to add Power BI goals scorecards as tabs in meetings and channels, so your team can focus on what’s most important and show measurable impact.

 

We’ve added dashboard sharing and request access notifications to Microsoft Teams. This adds to the report sharing and request access notifications we shipped earlier this year. These notifications help users stay up to date right where they’re already working, eliminating expensive context switching by letting you view reports or grant access requests right in the Teams activity feed.

 

We’re also making it easier to bring data from Power BI into the places where you collaborate. Soon we’ll enable users to pin a report as a tab in a channel right from within a report in Power BI.

 

And when you use a Power BI tab in a Teams channel, you can quickly find it on Power BI home’s In Teams list.

 

We’re committed to making data easy for everyone to use data no matter how skilled they are. The built-in Teams Analytics report is a great starting point. It provides actionable metrics that help individuals improve their collaboration. It’s available to everyone with a Power BI (Free) license.

 

The Power BI app for Teams makes it easier to get stared with Power BI and helps everyone in your organization access the full breadth of Power BI capabilities.

• Power BI goals (Preview) helps anyone and any team become goal driven in seconds by defining objectives, setting targets, and either manually updating progress or connecting to refreshable data Power BI.
• Power BI quick create empowers anyone to automatically summarize and visualize a table of data with a simple copy and paste.
• Power BI app templates help you find compelling out-of-the-box templates for analyzing data from other SaaS services
• The datasets hub provides one location to discover the best and most authoritative data shared in your organization and with one click you can create a report, or a connected Excel workbook.

These capabilities add to our rich collaboration features like chat in Teams, rich preview cards, interactive report and scorecard tabs, and search integration.

And you can do all of this without leaving Microsoft Teams!

Lastly, to help you get started quickly, we’ve published new learning topics that make it simple to learn how to start using data in meetings, for your projects, with your teams, and at your organization. Try the app and learn how to use data to make better decisions today.

 

Easier org wide deployment with automatic installation

To help organizations deploy Power BI broadly, we’re adding new automatic installation of the app for Teams for Power BI service users who have a Microsoft Teams license. We’ll start automatic installation for new users in November 2021. Later, we’ll expand to all active users of the Power BI service. As we previously communicated in September, there’s a Power BI admin tenant setting available to govern this capability for your organization.

 

This new capability helps users who use the Power BI service to find and use their data in Microsoft Teams. Organizations can go even further to ensure users can quickly use data in Teams through a Teams Admin center app setup policy that installs and pins the Power BI app even for users who are not using the Power BI service yet, especially for users licensed to use Power BI. Read the guide on using app setup policies to deploy Power BI.

Broadly deploying and using the Power BI app in Microsoft Teams helps everyone quickly discover and use data in more decision making, and keeps everyone up-to-date with data and goals that help you focus on what matters most. It can lead to higher engagement with data, which helps more users use data to make better decisions and take better actions.