How to embed Power BI visuals into Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain – Part 1: Getting Started
Some of you may be wondering what it would take to have access to rich, interactive and powerful Power BI visuals directly in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain. Excitingly, the solution is not a very complicated one. There’s not even a need for additional licensing.
Microsoft simplified the process of delivering reports to Dynamic 365 users by pre-configuring and deploying Power BI Embedded for each multi-box and cloud-hosted environment. Users can access Power BI reports from Analytical workspaces, located directly on the main Dynamics 365 page. On the other hand, one-box environments are not so lucky. They require a number of additional steps to configure Power BI Embedded. Microsoft plans to simplify this process for one-box environments in the future.
At first, reports appear to be blank as no data has been loaded to the Entity store. Each report fetches data from a corresponding aggregate measure in the Entity store. An administrator needs to go to System administration > Setup > Entity store to perform data refresh. The Entity store management form provides a choice of scheduling a recurring refresh or performing measurement refresh on demand.
If appropriate aggregate measures have been refreshed, users will be able to view data and interact with Power BI Embedded reports. Users may need to be aware that data is refreshed with certain intervals as configured on the Entity store management form. It is possible to configure different refresh intervals for different aggregate measurements to meet specific business requirements.
In some cases, reports are not available in Workspaces because they have not been deployed yet. To address this, corresponding Power BI report files would need to be deployed from System administration > Setup > Deploy Power BI files. The form might display a prompt to establish a connection to LCS before the report list can be viewed.
That’s all it really takes to get started with Power BI Embedded and empower your users to make better and smarter decisions.
If you would like to find out more about different measurement refresh options or learn how to modify existing or even embed your own Power BI Embedded reports, please continue reading in Parts 2 and 3 (coming later this week).
Additional information and details can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/analytics/power-bi-embedded-integration