Enabling Power BI in O365 (SharePoint Online)

Is your organization currently using SharePoint Online? Are you planning to leverage the power of Microsoft’s BI to power your organization’s analytical needs or have just purchased licenses for Power BI? If the answer is “Yes” to either of the above two questions, then it is very important to understand how these two solutions from Microsoft talk to each other to provide a robust collaborative environment.

Let’s say for all practical purposes your organization has purchased SharePoint Online (O365) licenses. As part of the standard set up let’s assume that your organization has set up 3 different sites namely Team, Public and Collaboration (Figure 1). The tabs in O365 portal looks something like this (Figure 2).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Now once your organization subscribes to Power BI, your organization specific Power BI instance gets created within the O365 instance. You will now see a Power BI tab getting added to your O365 portal (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Clicking on this Power BI takes you to the Power BI page. Here an individual who has been given access Power BI can view the different sites that have Power BI instantiated, monitor the usage of data, queries, reports that have been uploaded by you and shared to others. It also provides you the links to various favorite reports and sites. One cannot upload new documents or collaborate using this page. Refer Figure 4 below.

Figure 4

Once the Power BI subscription is activated, a Power BI SharePoint App (Figure 5) gets attached to the site contents of each of the site instantiated.

Figure 5

The next step is to attach/add the Power BI from the site content of the site to invoke the Power BI capabilities to that site.  Once the Power BI App is attached/added to a site, a link gets created from the O365 site to the Power BI site.  Upon clicking on the Power BI app after adding, it will take you to a Power BI page from where new documents/reports can added, shared and perform Q&A (Figure 6)

Figure 6

We can add/invoke Power BI functionalities to as many sites as our organization’s O365 tenant will allow us to do.  We can upload documents from to each of these Power BI sites and collaborate with different users within the organizations (Figure 7)

Figure 7

Hope this was helpful. Happy Learning!!!