We Just Want to View Reports! – Ep. 432
Mike and Tommy tackle a common frustration: how to give report viewers a simple experience without exposing them to the full complexity of Fabric. They explore SharePoint embedding, org apps, dedicated embedding solutions, and the importance of identifying user personas.
News & Announcements
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Power BI June 2025 Feature Summary — The June 2025 update includes visual calculations updates, sparklines going GA, numeric range and field parameter enhancements, and new tenant settings for the Azure Maps visual. Notably, Power Query editing in the web for import models is now in preview, and org apps are getting paginated report support and Copilot integration.
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Introducing Upgrades to AI Functions for Better Performance and Lower Costs — Microsoft upgraded the default model powering AI functions to GPT-4o-mini, boosting intelligence while reducing costs with a 128k input token context window. The AI functions library is now preinstalled on the Fabric 1.3 runtime, eliminating manual installation steps for LLM-powered data transformations.
Main Discussion: Simplifying the Report Viewing Experience
A listener writes in with a question many organizations face: “How can I easily provide access to Power BI reports without having all of our users seeing and being confused by a bunch of Fabric items they don’t have permission to use?” They’re running an F64 capacity with free licenses for report viewers and just want a simple experience.
Happy 10 Years, Power BI!
Mike and Tommy celebrate Power BI’s 10th anniversary, noting they can finally legitimately claim 10+ years of experience. Mike highlights the new Power BI Desktop loading screen that cycles through every historical logo — from SharePoint BI all the way to the current branding — complete with Henry the owl making a cameo. Tommy jokes about thinking his PC had reverted to Silverlight when he first saw it.
Power Query Editing in the Web
Tommy highlights the long-awaited ability to edit Power Query directly in the web for import models. You can now add tables, transform queries, and refresh data without reopening Power BI Desktop. Mike notes this is a no-brainer feature that should have existed years ago, pointing out that DAX query view in the web arrived well before Power Query editing did. Both agree they’re eager to see the Tidal view (code view) come to the web service as well.
Org Apps Getting More Love
Mike calls out three features in this update all centered on org apps: paginated report support, Copilot integration, and mobile availability. He sees org apps as a better implementation of the old workspace apps — easier to manage and more flexible with app audiences. Tommy takes the opportunity to joke about bringing back content packs, sparking a story about trying to trace the origin of a broken content pack like Sherlock Holmes.
The One-In, Two-Out Policy for Preview Features
Sparklines finally going GA sparks a discussion about the ever-growing list of preview features. Mike proposes a Christmas-inspired “one-in, one-out” policy — or better yet, one-in, two-out — arguing Microsoft shouldn’t add new preview features until they graduate existing ones. Tommy estimates it could take four years to get the preview list down to a single page at the current pace.
AI Integration Expectations
Mike shares that he’s now choosing applications based on how well they integrate AI. If an app has a text box without AI assistance, it feels outdated. Tommy agrees but pushes back on Copilot in Power Apps specifically, saying he always uses ChatGPT’s sidebar instead because the built-in Copilot isn’t reliable enough. Mike reveals his workflow: ChatGPT for reasoning, Claude for coding — though he acknowledges this will all change in two months.
The Future of Local AI Models
Mike predicts organizations will eventually run models locally on dedicated hardware rather than sending everything to the cloud. Tommy reveals he has four terabytes of local models on his PC with a powerful GPU, opting to test locally rather than burn Azure credits. Both see parallels to the early days of the internet, where expensive centralized systems gradually gave way to powerful local machines.
Identifying User Personas
Mike breaks down the audience into concentric circles: the vast majority (80%) just want to view reports and get their numbers. A smaller ring wants to copy and edit reports. An even smaller group creates reports from scratch on existing semantic models. And the smallest circle builds semantic models themselves. The key insight: identify which persona each user falls into and tailor the experience accordingly.
Solution 1: Embed in SharePoint, Teams, and PowerPoint
For the read-and-export crowd, embedding reports directly into SharePoint, Teams, or PowerPoint is the simplest approach. It keeps users out of the full Fabric portal entirely. Tommy notes the trade-offs — no personal bookmarks, limited view sizes, fewer activity bar features — but agrees it’s a valid solution for organizations that just need basic report consumption.
Solution 2: Org Apps with Direct Links
Tommy’s default recommendation: use org apps and distribute direct links. Bookmark the marketing app URL, send it to the marketing team, done. App audiences allow granular control over who sees what, eliminating the need to share individual reports. Both strongly advise against sharing workspaces directly with free users or sharing individual reports from workspaces.
Solution 3: Embedded Solutions
Mike makes a strong case for PowerBI embedding as an untapped opportunity, especially for internal users — not just external customers. With dedicated Fabric capacity, you can build streamlined experiences with single sign-on, role-level security, bookmarks, and report editing capabilities. Mike notes his own marketplace solution can get organizations embedding within an hour, versus the 6-9 months a custom build would take.
Stop Emailing Reports
Mike goes on a passionate tangent about scheduled report emails: the practice made sense when Business Objects reports took 10 minutes to run, but with interactive reports that load in seconds and stay up-to-date, there’s no reason to dump data into email inboxes. Tommy agrees — email is saturated enough with communication without adding data exports to the mix.
Looking Forward
Mike and Tommy encourage organizations to think critically about user personas before choosing a distribution method. The options exist — SharePoint embedding, org apps, dedicated embedding solutions — but the right choice depends on your audience’s needs and data culture maturity. They also note Microsoft is planning differentiated user experiences in Fabric, which could help tailor the portal for different security groups.
Episode Transcript
Full verbatim transcript — click any timestamp to jump to that moment:
0:32 Good morning and welcome back to the Explicit Measures podcast with Tommy and Mike. Good morning everyone and welcome back to the to the episodes. Happy 10 years. Happy 10 years. Yes, very true. Have did you have you installed the most recent version of PowerBI desktop, Tommy? I have it downloaded but I have not actually installed it yet. Okay. After you install the newest version download of PowerBI desktop, the introduction screen, the little screen that loads when you run the one desktop. Oh, they did it. It’s totally different
1:04 Now. It’s totally different. And they did that in May. Yeah. Is that May thing? I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t install m but like now the little loading screen it starts off with SharePoint BI which is what the original version was and then it goes to all the different logos of PowerBI through the different logos and then it it resolves to the final logo and then Henry the owl shows up and says hello there for a little bit at the end which is funny because I feel like in the more recent powerb.com experiences I’m not seeing Henry as much like something may go
1:36 Wrong but I don’t see Henry , that’s probably a good thing cuz usually Henry was like, “Uhoh, there’s a problem.” I didn’t want to see Henry. You don’t want to see Henry, but he’s there. Actually, I don’t know if he’s Is he still here? Henry Henry still is behind my microphone. You can still see him on the podcast. Those who are recording live, Henry is part of my desk. So, he’s great. Yay, Henry. Anyways, super awesome. Love Henry. , that was a nice little tie in there. I thought that was very cute that they add that. So, anyways, super fun. I like it when I see Microsoft having some
2:08 Fun with some things and doing some things that are a little bit fresh and and new and a little bit not normal. See, I thought I thought I broke something because I have to upgrade my entire PC by October. The Windows 10 and Windows 11 thing and I when I first saw that logo, I’m like, “Oh no, they reverted me.” Well, I’m now on Silver Light. It’s It’s gone. We’ve gone back. Oh no, I’m on designer again. Oh no. Oh, that’s funny. All right, let’s just talk about our main topic today. So, our main topic today is going to be gosh darn it, we just want to look at reports, right?
2:42 , powerbi.com has gotten very robust. There’s a lot of features in there. Users can come in and do so many different things with powerbi.com, which is wonderful. U, we do like the fact that it gives us so much capability, but there are some users in our organization who get overwhelmed very easily and you’re throwing a brand new program at them. How do we simplify this experience? What does this look like to give a a user experience that’s just the reports? What options do we have here? And there’s a lot of options to do this, Tommy. So, we’re going to talk about some of those options. , and I think
3:14 Also as an organization or an admin of PowerBI, you really want to contemplate like how are you consuming the reports? I don’t think people spend enough time on what you actually use. like we get excited about building models and measures and all these different things and we get maybe overwhelmed with the amount of things we have to teach our team to get up to speed on PowerBI. There might be opportunities for us here to really sit back and say let’s identify key audiences of using the PowerBI experience and then we can better cater those experiences to what
3:47 The people are ready to use. I think for a lot of people listening this is going to be a nice refresher. It’s good to take a step back on what are we really trying to do here? We love all the widgets, the things, the technical things, the notebooks, and all the new things, but at the end of the day, when you clear it all out, what are we trying to do here? And that’s correct. How do we get people to view our reports? And we’ve been talking a lot, , we we’ve been talking tons recently around like AI and how it’s going to change things and agents and all these other new things. There’s a lot of exciting things that Microsoft is developing, but these are it it feels like a lot of the new things are very technical solutions.
4:22 We’re just going to go simple here. We’re going to go basic. How do I get data out of my reports? Where’s the best place to view my reports? That’s what we’ll talk about today. All right, that being said, let’s go through some of the news items. Tommy, we have a couple news items here. Yeah, we’re just we were just talking about 10 years old for PowerBI. So, that was that’s one of our items here. let’s talk about the Microsoft blog. Oh, yeah. The mic the PowerBI blog too made an appearance. It’s not just Fabric here. So, it is the June 2025 update for Microsoft PowerBI. And again, the reason we said happy 10 years because officially, Mike, we can
4:57 Finally say as of I guess today that you and I have been working in PowerBI for 10 plus years. Yeah. And we can we can actually add it on a resume, right? So it’s actually real. Exactly. There’s no lie here. I think I think like three years ago we were joking like, “Oh, there yeah, everyone says 10 plus years on PowerBI.” Like, yeah, that’s not It hasn’t even really been out that long. So, anytime I see a resume that’s asking for 10 plus years of PowerBI experience, like yeah, that’s that’s not even a thing. But now, this is the first time, Tommy, just barely. It’s like 10 years,
5:29 Like a couple days. That’s a plus. That’s a plus for me. So, you and I are one of the few that started using PowerBI from the get-go. I’ll never forget the day. I remember we we’re already looking for BI solutions at my organization. they wanted this change and I’m searching the web and I see this blog come out saying introducing power to to come like Microsoft’s announcing this new tool and I remember downloading it and I just remember being just floored. I immediately made my page scrollable
6:03 Which was the mistake but it was her first day first week using PowerBI but PowerBI designer came out. I just remember Mike, the thought I had when it first came out was if this is Microsoft and everyone uses Office 365 and this is as cool as I think it is, I’m going to put all my eggs in this basket. I’m going to put all my skill, all my effort into this because I think there’s something here. Hey, so far so There we go. It’s getting better. And speaking of updates, Mike, , we can do this little draft style, but there’s a
6:36 Cool one that I’m finally happy to see. This goes along with our first episode a lot of homage today. Well, if you import a model, have an imported model, a semantic model, and you publish to the web, you’re like, “Ah, I need to edit something in Power Query.” Well, Mike, what’s been our case all this time? Reopen the PowerBI desktop. desktop. Oh, re go to Power Query, do some edits. You could venture into Tableau editor, but then you can’t download that model. But now this month, Microsoft is excited
7:09 To deliver Power Query editing online for import models. This is awesome. This is really cool because again, this is one of those for me that I wish I had six years ago. Would have saved a lot of time, but bygones bygones. But what I can what I can actually do now is not just edit a power power query. I can get data into and import tables to an existing semantic model. So let’s say you’re like, “Oh, I forgot something from a dataf flow. I forgot something from a SQL table.” I can do that. I can transform and edit queries and I can refresh the schema and the data in the
7:44 Web. Yep. , this is like a again, I just feel like a lot of times I look at the the Power Query team and I’m I’m going to rag on them a little bit here, but it it’s it I don’t know what was happening, but it feels like we’re start we’re starting to finally get the features that we actually needed like months ago. Like I don’t know what was going on on that team years ago. Like like this is to me this is like a no-brainer. We we had like DAX query view inside the web to write DAX and better equations. Like that was done way before we had the power query
8:17 Experience. Power query. Yeah. Power query data flows gen one was like out there for like has been out since dataf flows gen one like years now. So like this is a this is a very welcome feature in my mind. In my mind this is abs excellent to have this inside an import model that’s there. even if I have a model that has one table I’m going to shape some different things. I’m going to add more things to it. Like this makes total sense. I should be able to land the power query experience anywhere I want. Go back in edit tables right from the service. Yeah, , I’m in the edit model experience. Power Query should just pop up in the browser. Like that’s just makes sense. It should just be there. So, I got to play with
8:50 This a bit more. , I’m very pleased to see this feature existing. I’m very pleased to see this feature available to us now. That that can all be edited directly in the service. So, I’m going to play with it a bit more for sure. Love this. I think this is great. , one other thing I’ll just point out here around Power Queryesque things. , I really really like the ability to see the timle. So, one thing I’m actually really waiting for, but pins and needles here a little bit is the timal view is only in PowerBI desktop right now. I really can’t wait until Timle view is actually inside the
9:23 The web and the service. That was another place where I found immense amount of value. Again, I don’t write Power Query from scratch. I’m not an Alex Powers. I don’t I don’t write it line by line as exactly as I need it and have it work 100% of the time. But if you go to the timal view, you could actually modify and tweak slight properties or adjust things. And I’ve done that before with using tindle. So even just having timal inside the service would also be another big win. So hopefully those features are going to be coming to the service at some point. I I fully envision it would make sense to have all the feature parody between desktop and service be like they would
9:56 Match. I I I think that’s just the right way Microsoft is going to go. desktop will continue will start moving more towards like a pro development tool and you’re going to start building more and more things directly inside the web and the and the service side of things. It is curious because no the tindle it’s amazing how much time that can really save if and like I know we’ve talked about that being a pure developer based tooling but if you’re doing power query if you have a pretty extensive experience in power query it doesn’t take too much to get over that learning curve. It’s not a it’s not a
10:29 Terrible or a very steep learning curve. I need to remove a few columns and I’m like oh what I need to remove a few more from Power Query. Well, rather than opening up desktop and going through the refresh, I just had to edit Tindle, add a few extra columns, and I can do that. I already see the code. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It’s not It’s not Tindle’s not a steep learning curve at all. It’s you got still know what you’re doing to a bit. There’s some indention, , or some syntax, but it’s not like, oh, if you want to edit this, you got to know some Python. So, I’m really happy to see that. Mike, you got anything from the
11:02 Blog that you want to add? Yeah, things things I want to highlight here. So, one thing I just I find is interesting. Let me get the right list here. So in and this is maybe a general observation and again I’ll just call it out and I’m very pleased to see this. There is now in this blog post I believe or this whole post here. There are three features I think I see here all centering around the org apps. The org apps are getting more things inside them. So for example the org app and I’m going to point out a couple that I think
11:33 Are relevant here. There’s so now support for adding pageionate reports to an org app. Duh. That should have been like a no-brainer. Like that. Yeah, I want to see those things in there as well. You’d be surprised how many maybe not you, but like other like people there’s a lot of organizations that are still just using pageionate reports. That’s the extent of their reporting. They say we need a report. It’s it it is a SSRS report that they’re looking for. Like just send it to me. Get it in my inbox. The amount of organizations that just need that core functionality solid and covered is amazing. So just to
12:08 Have the pageant report experience directly inside the service right inside an org app that makes total sense to me. I think this is a big win there as well. I I think it’s I wish I was surprised I wish I was surprised how many organizations but unfortunately I’ve I’ve seen it way too much but this is a good one. So I’m going to pick this one as just ju just maybe two observations here is the idea of one is the organization apps is just getting more love it’s getting more features I would like to see the organization apps get additional things right so another one here that you see is you can use co-pilot on reports inside or apps so
12:41 That’s another one that they’re they’re adding there as well I think down at the bottom there’s like or apps are now available in powerbi mobile like again they’re extending that the org app is is is extending itself and I like it honestly I like the fact that the org app is an artifact inside the workspace and I can make multiples of those things, no problem. Like that makes total sense to me. So I think this is a better implementation of the, , workspace app that we had in the past. And I think this just makes a lot more sense to me. Easier to use even for for from my standpoint. Oh, I’m saying bring back content packs, man. So
13:16 Oh, boy. You’re really trying to throw stones, Tommy. I I’m throw I’m throwing some old You’re looking for an argument. , I don’t even know how many people even understood or even used content packs before. They were so difficult to work with. , it was a neat idea, but I think the implementation of it was just totally off. Final little story, since we’re at our 10 years, , someone left the organization and they built this content pack that they did for demos for the sales team and completely broken. I never felt more like Sherlock Holmes than trying to figure out who what the origin of this content pack was, which
13:50 Proved to be nearly impossible because it didn’t have anything about authors. It’s like, well, wait, who who shared it with you? Okay, who shared it with you? How did you get access? And this rabbit hole of trying to go down content packs, but no, Mike, I I completely agree the the or apps, they have to be robust. They have to be something and they have to be much better than what the or already workspace apps are. I’m loving where they’re going with this and to me this is just it’s such an easy adoption feature or tooling that we can use. I would agree with that one 100%. a few
14:24 Things we can cross off our kill it or complete it list by the way. Yep. Sure. All that. So I think that’s always a good day for us when we can cross something out. we now have spark lines our GA GA. I always I always love to see things going GA. Let’s make that large 100 mile preview feature list a little bit smaller every month. That would be great if we could get one out. I think there at some Tommy this is this is a Christmas this is a Christmas story here. Okay. Okay. When when we do Christmas with our children at our house Christmas and June what we do is we talk to our kids and we say
14:58 Look you’re going to get some new things for Christmas. Right. We have we have a rough and it’s not we don’t hold it’s not 100% we don’t hold on to it really hard but if we have a rough onein one out policy right if you get something new at Christmas right if you get something new at Christmas you have to go donate something or sell it or get rid of something else we like we’re going to you’re going to get more things at Christmas time we need to like purge some of the old stuff and keep in some of the new things and the only thing we don’t purge is Legos right we just keep amassing lots and lots and
15:31 Lots Lego. So, those those are out of the out of the question. You don’t touch the Legos. That’s that’s a bar none. leave those alone. But other than that, we do a bit of a onein, one out policy. So, I feel like, , Tommy, if we keep going down this preview features level, we’re going to need a a onein, one out policy. You can’t put another feature into preview until you get one out of preview or maybe two out of preview. We might have to go like a one in, two out. I think it needs to be a one, two out. Yeah, one in, two out thing. So yes, exactly. We got to do something. We got to do something. We don’t have
16:02 Enough space anymore. So, exactly. I don’t want a scrollable list of all the preview features. Let’s Let’s kill some things. Let’s get some stuff done. Let’s get it off the preview list. I want to see you finish the features before we start adding a whole bunch of new like this. And I I listen, I am someone. You give me something on Windows. You give me something on any application. I am toggling every preview beta totally everything. Everything all of it. That being said, when it’s something like Spark Lines, which has already been available for I want to say four plus years. It has to be four years at this point. I don’t even know. It feels
16:35 Longer and you’re like, “Oh, this was still a preview.” I don’t It has to go through probably some review, quality review for an order for it to be GA and it’s probably always at that threshold, but it’s just not enough. But at the same time, like you have like unlike my own computer or my own products where I Yeah, I can toggle everything. Something breaks, that’s on me. I can’t I can’t confidently put out a lot of things to organization when I know it’s in preview if something’s going to break. I’ve been burned by that before in PowerBI alone. And I think anytime you’re
17:09 Dealing with technology, you have to have that. So if I’m a lot of organizations too, they’re not going to touch it unless it’s GA. So yeah, one in, two out. But , the downside though is we got one in, two out. We still have Trans Lolitical that showed up in like last month or so. So like we got we still haven’t like we didn’t really move any move the needle here. We got we got one in, one out. So we’re still sit the same. I guess my my question back to you Tommy would be how many years will it be until we get to one page? No, no, no. One page of preview features. So if we’re on the pace we’re on now, never. But I think
17:44 I would say unless they introduce something like fabric 2, I would say in four years they’ll catch up. However, by then it’s there’s going to be some we’ll see you in we’ll see you at PowerBI 20 years old and then we’ll maybe maybe we’ll get it there. Episode 1000. Episode 1000. Do you think one page page a printable page of a single page of preview features? I don’t know if I am taking the over on that episode 130. , no, that that’s a really good one. And I think the other
18:19 Things I know we’re from a time point of dude, I love updates. I the PowerBI June updates or just the updates just make me so happy. There’s a few other ones here. Definitely take a look at them. , I think we’d be remissed to talk a little about AI. , some AI updates here. And I know I’ve heard people complain, you guys talk a lot about AI now. I’ve never heard anyone complain about that. But Mike, to me, this is the same thing like if we were a search blog and we never talked about Google. This is the world we live in. I’m sorry. This is just part of the game now. So
18:53 New rules. I think Microsoft’s forced a hand here a little bit because it’s it’s their motive. Like they’re they’re all about AI on everything. It’s going to it’s going to be happening. And to be honest, Tommy, I’m I am I’m really I have some apps that I’ve been using recently that don’t have AI in them. And now I’m actually deciding to choose different applications based on how well they’ve integrated their AI. And now I’m I’m starting to formulate opinions already. Like it’s been maybe a year or so, but now I’m I’m getting to the place where like if this stuff doesn’t have AI already built into them or doesn’t automatically do some automation of
19:26 Things for me automatically the app, it’s not as useful. Like I don’t want or you ever use it? Well, one of the things I’m looking at right now is the So we build a lot of apps for the Microsoft marketplace. Microsoft marketplace. The marketplace doesn’t have any AI code generation, AI read your stuff. So, I’m constantly using like the browser AI to generate code, but like there should be an AI inside the Azure marketplace for developers to to push code in there. Like this is the description. Here’s a bulleted list. List me the features. Like it should give you examples of things. I’m looking at every time I look
19:59 At a piece of software now, I’m looking for if there’s a text box, I’m expecting some AI to help me build some text in that box. I’m getting lazy now, dude. Let me do you one better. , for one of the oldest products Microsoft had with Copilot is Power Apps. And I never use Copilot in Power Apps. I’m always using Chat GPT to help me generate the functions or what I need to do because to your point, not only am I looking for something that has it, I’m looking for something that’s reliable and consistent to what I need. And I’m sorry, the
20:32 Copilot and Power Apps does not do it for me. If anything, it makes me yell not great words when I ask for something. And I’m using the chat GPT sidebar for what I need because to your point, we are not just expecting AI to be there, but we are realizing like, oh, it can solve most if not many of my problems or projects I’m working on. So, anyways, that being said, we’re just that’s part of the game, especially when we’re dealing with our data. So a very awesome update here to introducing
21:05 Upgrades to the AI functions for better performance and lower cost. So these are the AI functions available in LML transformations in our notebooks. Well now they’re accessible to all they’re already accessible to all paid fabric SKs. This is not just your F64. And now what we actually have is enhanced intelligence. So now we can actually deal with a larger context tokens which is really or input amazing which is great. We can use chatgpt mini 40 mini even though there’s like 18 more that have already come out since then
21:38 But that’s a different thing. This that that right there is becoming a problem. it’s going to become an issue like it the the speed at which these companies are now developing like everyone’s now glomming on to like this this experience of like we have to have these things. There’s lots of different models and and certain models are doing different things different ways. I’ve been working with my development team and we’ve been as I’ve been asking like look what where is this most effective just help me understand like where do I use these different AIs at what time? What’s the best way to do it? And I was talking with my developer and he was saying sometimes I’ll use, ,
22:11 Chat GPT04 mini or 04 and then I’ll I’ll use it for like a couple hours and then all of a sudden it like gets confused and starts slowing down. And he’s like, okay, then I switch to a different model and then use that for a couple hours. Like he’s like, I still haven’t quite figured out like which one is the best for what I’m trying to do. But we’re really starting to see like, , different agents or different large language models are specializing in certain areas a bit more than others. And so, , now it’s it I don’t know if it’s going to be initially I would think it’d be like one
22:43 Co-pilot, one agent that would do everything. I don’t think so anymore, honestly. I think we’re going to have to have a collection of different agents and so our systems and tooling will have to be in different spaces within your application. You’ll need to be able to switch rapidly between different agents. , I was just looking at another one. , another I use a lot of good YouTube has figured out my algorithm and YouTube knows I watch a lot of videos around AI now. So, it feeds me all the AI YouTube videos and there’s now there’s now tooling where you can run across multiple models. You can run the same
23:17 Prompt same prompt in multiple areas and see what it gives you and pick from three choices. So, so now you can have different things that What was that? Was it called Gina? G I N. No. Okay. It was one where you could actually run it. You could even like build your models and run them locally as well. You could build like a local model server as well. One thing I’m interested right now is like I’m it’s not expensive to run a model. you can go buy one of them. But my problem right now is I don’t want to really buy four different five different AI agents and have subscriptions to them just to use them.
23:49 So I Okay, this is going to be weird. I’m gonna I’m gonna do a little bit of forecasting here. Tommy, I see the writing is on the wall here. Right. I’m listening. Between Apple, between these devices, between the thing I have in my hand, what I think is going to happen in the next couple years, these models are awesome. They run really well. They’re in the cloud. What’s going to happen? I think the models will get more efficient, easier to run. And as the computers, like the local computers get better, you may even buy and I think and Nvidia is also starting to allude to this as well. You may buy a little box that you put all your models on and then
24:24 You just talk to that box, right? That one box, right? So that way it’s not getting sent over the internet. You’re not giving your data to a different company like there’s there’s a , maybe for an organization you say, “Look, I don’t want to buy co-pilot anymore. I want to go buy a piece of hardware or stand up a virtual machine and then everyone can run their models, their questions against that machine which has the trained model down in it. It’s it’s insane. Yeah, but it it feels like there’s like a there’s a shift happening here where the models
24:57 Are large right now. We can’t run them on on on machines. This feels like the very early days of the internet. Like you had like it was very large machines only expensive stuff initially and then as cost came down as efficiency picked up we started bringing like lo small smaller and smaller machines and now you’ve got these massively power graphics processing units on your local machine locally you can use and now we’re going to offload that heavy expensive work down to local machines where I can just have the machine I’ve bought it I’ve already paid for it I want to run this machine thing. So I don’t know we’ll see where this goes. I think I think you’re spot on. , I
25:30 Have 12 I have invested a ton on my own PC because why would I if I’m going to test an experiment, why would I spend cost on the cloud when I’m really doing testing? So, I have correct four terabytes of local models right now of just download local models that I use. I have a pretty good GPU because I could I could spend that in Azure, but then it’s we’re not going to Sam’s anymore, , forget with what it can be because it’s expensive. So, there’s a lot right my problem my here’s my thing that we need to do just like iOS did right
26:05 Now chat GPT has like what four seven models you can use but they’re all the naming I want one that has like an R for reasoning I want one that has C for coding what are you better at I don’t know my secret sauce now to your earlier point I use chat GPT for reasoning and I use claude for my coding so if I have if I’m doing something with cursor for example I have two agents always running. But no, but it’s all this is dumb. It’s at at the same time this is all dumb because there all this knowledge that I’m using it’s going to
26:36 Change in two months. It’s going to be completely different in two months. And to your point Tommy like again I was unpacking this experience with my developer and I was actually talking with him. I said look he goes well sometimes I ask the code to do something or the agent to do something he doesn’t quite get it right and then I I spent a lot of time debugging what the agent did. And I said, “What I have found is if I if I take these tasks that I’m trying to do and make them smaller, make them less less large and just plan out the different pieces, I I it seems to work better for me.” So, I think there’s going to be a place in time here where we’re going to say, “Look, you
27:08 Know, we’re going to talk to your point, Tommy, let’s talk to chat GPT first and say, “Hey, reason with me how to build this app, how to build this thing. give me give me how give me the procedure on what you would do.” Okay, now that we have the procedure, okay, let’s go another layer deeper and let’s further reason. Give me the steps for each of these reasoning elements, right? And now you have these various sequential steps. And then you can say, okay, feed each step now into Claude or something else. And so now you’re taking like, okay, I’m going to think with one agent, build a plan. Once you have the
27:42 Plan, use the plan somewhere else, and have them go build one step of the plan. like but now I need multiple agents to work together like today right today in the experience of like cursor or VS code I don’t really have the ability of taking like one agent using it and then taking the output of that agent and pushing it to another yet right so I think there’s going to be something here where we’re going to need the ability to like switch context inside the agents right have a conversation with one agent feed that conversation over to the
28:15 Second agent and then have the second agent pick up that conversation and move on. That’s where I think things need to start going, but we’re not quite there yet. To and I think going back to fabric here because I would love to keep doing the cursor thing. I the biggest thing for me with the limitations in co-pilot now and fabric is they are building it for all types of audiences. Whether I’m just a beginner just starting out, so I’m going to start building a data agent. I need a prolevel view of this. There there is now going there is going to be if not already this person that is going to be skilled in
28:50 Data and skilled in AI and right now there is really no good really feel for that you can say I AI foundry but that’s more AI you can say data agents but that’s still more data I need to have the full open the box for me I imagine if this if you’re building cars right now they’re trying to have the like the kit like here’s your kit to build a car well Yeah, I have the ability to go under the hood. I’m like that. I’m good at it. That’s more I’m comfortable with. So, give me that ability. Let me choose my models. Let me go through the system
29:22 Instructions. Let me choose the input tokens, the temperatures, all the things that and if you’re going to make this available to an organization. I don’t want just the out of the box solution. I So, anyways, I think that’s where we’re going. But to go back to the the blog update, there’s a lot more AI functions available. no more manual library functions and I think they’re getting there some ways but I want to see that more and this is actually not a bad segue Mike because we’re talking about a lot of technical things here and a lot of people I think listening to us now
29:55 And I I I I understand people who are complaining and I can hear you running or biking guys I just we do reports that’s our thing that’s what I get paid for AI is not the thing so let’s let’s take a back step let’s backtrack here Let’s walk it back now. Let’s walk it back. Let’s walk it back. Let’s walk it back more what PowerBI is and do do you want me to do the mailbag or do you want to introduce it a little? Tommy, you do let’s have you read the mailbag out and then we’ll take the conversation from there and we’ll unpack this question and really go get into the meat of like, you
30:28 Know, exactly what what do we mean by this topic? Go ahead, Tommy. Take it away. We’re going straight hamburgers. We’re taking out all the sauces here. So, we have a mailbag. Thanks for whoever submitted this, but here we How can I easily provide access to PowerBI reports without having all of our users seeing and being confused by a bunch of Fabric items they don’t have permissions to use. We are using an F64 capacity and Microsoft Fabric free licenses for our report viewers. We just want them to be able to
31:01 View reports and not click around fabric to a forum where they’re trying to purchase, create, or configure something only to be met with an error or an other dead end. There doesn’t seem to be a way to achieve a simple user experience in So, man, do we have a lot to unpack here. Yeah, it’s funny to be like and we’re talking about this user is talking about fabric level things which is I get that. I understand that one and that and we’re going to we’re going to the
31:36 Question here is gearing towards like how do we get that simpler experience in fabric. I the short answer of this one is you’re not because fabric is like a bajillion new items and things you can go play with, right? So it’s SQL databases, it’s warehouses, it’s functions, it’s notebooks, like it’s all the things that are super amazing. And really what this is, , I look at this is going look fabric is the evolution of what Azure data platform was. Azure data plat all the things that you’re getting in fabric right now. It’s not like it’s not like Microsoft’s making new things.
32:09 These are all existing artifacts, exist existing software, existing like this is, , pipelines is built on top of Azure data factory, years of development. , it’s a very solid program. Pipelines are awesome. It’s brand new to PowerBI users because we’ve never had a touch before. We’ve never had to have data engineering brought into our our wheelhouse. So I think this is a genius move by actually building and bringing all of the Microsoft products into PowerBI and then the rebrand extending it to be fabric makes makes total sense. It it is funny
32:43 Mike because I I didn’t as you said that it I came to almost this this fruition or really this realization. I am so comfortable working in fabric and pipelines and all the things and I’ve been doing some pretty pretty far-flung stuff but when when it was in synapse and data factory I was intimidated and I think that the even though it’s the same like you said it’s the same product I have my parameters I have the same activities I can do but they’ve really made it easy but that being said again
33:16 If we took off the hat of who we are and the experience that we have and what we like to Most people and I’m the most people in organization don’t want to create anything in PowerBI that’s not that’s not going to be their focus. They they are there to view reports. You have report builders. I need to see my numbers and I need to get out. I need to see what I need to do. But now the fabric user interface is all about what can you create, what can you build, where can you go, what can you do and people are like I just want to see, I want to consume, I want to view,
33:50 Understand, move on. And I to this to the person who wrote this mailbag’s point, this is not easy. It’s it’s becoming harder and harder to have just that simple experience, especially if you’re going to PowerBI. , yeah. So, a few things off the bat that you would have to solve for. When we just had PowerBI, you could lead people to the app page. You had PowerBI home, which was really about consuming. It was a consumer experience, and you can lead them to the app page, which again was a consumer experience. PowerBI does not
34:24 Look like that anymore, or at least fabric, because it’s not PowerBI, it’s fabric. It’s really like, let’s just PowerBI is now a product of fabric. That’s where we’re at now. So that experience is nearly gone where I have a few people in mind that I worked with that they would be yelling at me for the experience even though it’s not my fault but that being said there’s a problem. So off the off the top of my head what do you give bookmarks links to just the apps? You don’t bring even bring people to PowerBI home or
34:58 Fabric home because we you can’t get around if you were to go through the normal navigation the user experience the user journey at app.p powerbi.com that you’re going to be going through this very what do you want to create when do you want to build most people are not going to get that and I’m sorry but just doing training support is not sufficient for a wider organization. Yeah, and I’m going to add to this even looking at the question here again, just reviewing, right? Let’s let’s really unpack what this user is doing here inside this context here, right? Inside the context of this
35:31 Question, they’re saying, “Look, we bought an F64, which an X6 F64 for those who don’t know, that allows you to have a PowerBI environment. It gives you a premium. You get all the premium features, deployment pipelines. So from the developer perspective, the developer has the ability to build whatever they need to build in PowerBI and F64 is also at the level where you get all the fabric things right to data engineering, right? I would argue there is two there’s multiple personas that are at play here, right? There is this free user mentality that they’re looking at.
36:05 And so what I think is happening is when the free user shows up to things that are in powerbi.com, there’s all these hooks to you can’t do this. Go get this thing. You’re trying to touch a fabric item. You don’t have access to it. Like all these little windows and pop-ups and buttons that doesn’t simplify the experience for those free users. So I do want to point out there’s two distinct personalities in this question. The first question, the first personality is I’m a developer and I’m going to build things in fabric and make things or content between PowerBI and fabric. That’s loading data
36:38 That’s using lakeouses, all those things. That’s different than the other persona that I think is being talked about here, which is the free user, a user who does not have a PowerBI pro or premium per user license, and they’re looking to get access to pageionate reports, , , PowerBI reports. or apps like it’s just consuming things. So I would I would agree with this one. There is so many hooks to get everyone into the fabric space. Microsoft is aggressively trying to apply to those free users minds.
37:16 Yeah. In order to get them in to build stuff. And I and I think I think to your point that’s that’s the right approach. They’re not going to stop doing it. It’s it’s the right way to go. Right. You’re going to try as Microsoft, you’re going to try and make it as easy as you can to get everyone to come in and play and create. That’s that’s the right approach. So, I want to talk a bit more around like, okay, how do we unpack this? Like, as us as admins or developers of the system, like how do we identify the different personas in your organization? And I really do think there’s actually a level there’s levels to this, right? When I when you look at the people in your organization, you really want to identify like how do
37:48 People consume content? Are you are you a are you an SSRS shop thing, right? Do you have a bunch of people who sit on their email and they just wait for reports to show up to them? That’s a report to you, right? So that’s that is a a use case, a persona of maybe how some organizations work. When we bring in PowerBI, there’s also this use case of well now I have a PowerBI report. It’s an interactive clickable. It’s almost like a a web a data app basically where you can interact with the data and then export some information out from it. So, is that what you need? , do you want
38:22 Users to be able to create their own reports on top of an existing semantic model? We’re going a little bit deeper now. We’re adding more capability to that user. And then, do you want to go all the way into now you’re creating your own semantic models? And so, as we keep to me, this is an onion that I keep unpeeling. And as I unpeel more and more of this onion about what my users need, some organizations are only at level one. They just want reports, put them in people’s hands, and they’re happy. Done. Move on. other organizations, they’re going to be people that are going to be capable and can handle more things. I’ll just pause right there. Reaction. No,
38:53 No. I love that because you’re talking about simplification here and maybe I’m sparked here because I just found out that I can play Nintendo 64 games on my Nintendo Switch. But you think about that experience. You just figured this out. I didn’t know this. I could play Super Mario 64. You can do You can do g You can do Game Boy. You can do what? Yeah. Go get There’s a Game Boy on there. You can do Game Boy games. You can do Nintendo. Regular Nintendo. You can do Are you telling Wait, hold on. Are you telling me I can play Star Fox 64 today? Yes. Yes. Okay, we got to go. Sorry, Tom. Tommy. Tommy’s done. This
39:29 Episode is over. This episode’s over. What? What? But okay, but where I’m going with this is the simplification of things and what that can do for a user if I wanted to play a game back in the day, I just had the cartridge, I plugged it in, it it just went to the start screen. But I had to do a lot of training with my kids when the Nintendo Switch came out. It’s like, well, you got to do this, got to go to the home screen, got to choose this, and there’s a lot more steps. Not saying that’s bad, but there’s this extra complication here. And it’s it’s interesting you said
40:03 The persona of the organization where for me I’m equating it to almost like an age skill level and I don’t want to say age per se but I see it with my own kids on their ability to play what games and to me this is very similar to the people I saw in my organization age had nothing to do with it but the idea where I I had a sales manager who was the with me the equivalent of my son who was four and was like okay I’m going to send you the links create a folder on your browser to go to these reports. Anything else was like go falling off a
40:37 Cliff and that was important for that user and that worked. A lot of organizations it’s not just the tooling that they have but it is so dependent on the users the users themselves and whether you have done any uptraining have you had PowerBI in your organization for a long time or more importantly what’s your data culture like and a lot of people I would say you take a random organization I would give you 80% just want to view a report they they may click on things but the
41:09 Majority want to consume they want a number. They don’t need the analyzed report. They don’t need any extra bells and whistles. They would like to view their numbers and move on. And that is perfectly fine. And guess what? There’s nothing wrong with that. If anything, that’s great. So, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s just that’s actually great if people are want viewing reports. So, then you have this 20% that want to do extra, but I got to focus on that 80%. Right. Like, I need to make sure they’re on board with everything. So, to your point, there’s all those extra things, but I I have to focus on
41:43 80% of my my users who just want to get to a report. And Mike, this is this is difficult. This is this is hard for a lot of users to get to. And I don’t blame I don’t blame them. As much as I can get it and figure it out, that’s not their job to figure it out. And I don’t I don’t know if it is, but I just I think I’m I’m not worried about figuring things out. I’m more thinking about I need I think we need to clearly identify who are the people and how we’re going to use our data. And I think that’s I don’t think when I walk into
42:16 Organizations I think everyone really starts thinking about creating semantic models and building reports from scratch and building reports. That’s that’s the main conversation that I have here. But a lot of times again I think as admins and I’ve done a lot of training on admins and working with organizations. There’s a very few sets of people that actually need to be doing that. Right? So if we think about concentric circles of like larger audiences, , for one user that’s creating semantic models, you’ve got five people building on top of that semantic model that make reports, for every five users you have creating reports, you have likeundred
42:50 50, I don’t know, some multiplier higher than that of people just wanting to consume data from reports. So it’s it increases in size. But back to this question really is like how do we do this? How do we simplify this experience? And my opinion here is for the people that are those free users, powerb.com is overwhelming. There’s too much there. There’s a lot going on. And I think there needs to be a simpler experience on just to how to get all of that done, right? It needs it needs to be , consolidated. It needs to be simpler. So, let’s talk about some of the options here. Let’s
43:22 Solve some of these problems, right? I’d like to talk about the the ability like if you have an F64, even all the way down to an F2, this works. It happens today inside the service. You can embed things directly into Teams, SharePoint, and into PowerPoint. So, as long as your capacity is on an F2 capacity, , like let me just expand this a little bit. Right? If you really wanted a simple portal for people to go look at and view reports from, you can easily embed them into SharePoint. Not very hard, very simple. And then all you have to do is grant the free user
43:55 Access to the SharePoint experience. Now again you can also use models with roll of security. you would need security groups and you have to configure those users to be attached to the roll of security inside powerb.com. But once they’re configured your reports would run just like normal roll of security will work. You can embed the reports and I’ve actually worked with organizations when we start very early on stages and companies are more comfortable with SharePoint because that’s been around for a long time. Here we go. Here’s our here’s our reporting portal. here’s a number of pages in SharePoint and you could just click through the reports.
44:28 Boom, they’re right there in your easy, not a problem. So, I really like the experience of being able to embed things in SharePoint. Another place that I spend a lot of time is in Teams. I’m there all the time. So, having reports embedded directly into Teams is also, in my opinion, a great win because the first app I turn on in the morning, it’s Teams. I need to communicate with my team members or other companies or whatever. So those are two places where there are already people in those experiences. Why not just put the reports exactly where people are already
45:00 Working today and and is a place to put it but for me I feel personally personally I it’s a little convoluted like they they have their they have their time and place but for a universal default solution they they have a lot of limitations especially the PowerPoint one and the SharePoint one. one what do you mean? So for example, I can’t have a state that I’ve saved it in and I can’t look at any personal bookmarks which I find a lot of people who are consuming they they want to do it. It’s that it’s a good we don’t have some of
45:34 The features available. So and then some of the things about the view how I actually want to view pages if I and also some of the extra things on the activity bar that people like to do if they want to there is drill through it still has that but usually both of them are also a much smaller view of the page. It’s not the same size of my browser or the SharePoint page. I can’t expand it. But again, this it’s you’re very it’s a has a time and place, but for me, it’s not the default way I would land someone. I like this pause right there cuz I’m going to unpack this. I
46:05 Mean, this is this is the part of the trade-off, right? So, this is I think evaluating that is this is this is the trade-off, right? So in in trading off not maximizing in trading off removing some of the menu bar options you get this to your po to your point Tommy right I’m going towards a simplified experience that’s what these are these are simplified experiences and I’m trying to pair down this overly complex system that is the powerbay.com experience and so I do think so again one of the things I just want to be
46:38 Clear about is when we talk about these different personas read and export data great opportunity for SharePoint, Teams, and PowerPoint. Love that. It’s very simplified. There’s not a lot going on there. You’re just starting out your team beyond that like so what happens if you want to edit that report or take a copy of that report and then edit it. Well, that doesn’t those experiences don’t give you that experience. So, when you move away, so if again the idea is like aligning what your audience needs, right? If you’re just only desiring read and export data from the the the reporting experience, that’s that is a a valid solution. And
47:14 Then yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. When you I want to move up a level and say, okay, now , if we’re talking to the next level ring of this is, okay, now I want to read reports, export data, and I may want users to copy and edit reports, and then what experiences can we build there? Yeah. And I think to me I I still even though I just said it’s it’s harder to get to. By no means does it make it worse. If anything it’s still the default for me. It’s a it’s a PowerBI app that’s available in in a workspace. The org apps I would recommend it unless you have to limit it still. There has to
47:47 Be your default base has to be just reports and dashboards. Man, I’m sorry but yeah let’s unpack those things as well. So apps and or apps are another thing that you could use but that is from powerba.com again if we’re talking about those things as well that still fits that read and export user experience because you can’t you can give the ability for users to build on top of it. So you start like you start getting to the place where and that’s a setting on the org app like you can allow it or you can not allow it. Yep. But inside the org app you have a series of reports and you have a series
48:20 Of semantic models supporting said reports. Right. if you give permissions to it, you now move up to okay, so now we moved into okay, we want to actually let users build their own content on top of existing semantic models. And this is where we’re start talking about read and edit, right? But now we’re going back to powerb.com and we’re making a specific artifact to share things. So I would argue to this question earlier, should I be sharing workspaces with users who are free users? No, you should not. Oh lord, no.
48:53 You should be you should be focusing on apps and org apps to distribute content to those free users and that way yes it’s still a powerbay.com yes you still have these extra things but at least you can start taking away some features from power.com and make it a bit easier to consume yeah and and I think the bigger thing here too if for the for the user’s question I just I don’t want them to see everything else well I’m hoping you have a center of excellence or a knowledge center there’s a link there’s a link that you can send out to users to say hey this is the marketing app yes you can get navigated to PowerBI, but it’s a lot easier too if you just land on your
49:27 Marketing app. And I know it’s not the best way, but at the same time, if you do want a portal that is for just marketing information, hey, everyone who’s in marketing, here is your link. Bookmark this in your browser, which you can save and just like people, and I’m assuming most people know how to use Micros or Chrome and Edge to make a bookmark. Here’s your all your reports and views. To me, this is the this is the default, the de facto way that solves most of the problems. Not everything, but for me, like there there
50:00 Is no other way that I’m going to recommend it. I am not going to share reports individually unless there’s someone who’s more experienced. Oh, no way. I’m not. It gets it gets so unwieldy about sharing indiv. And , as an admin, I get ahead. No, you go. Oh, no. I was going to say and even then now with apps I have app audiences so there is no reason there’s no reason for me to share a report individually anymore. No no and I would agree like when you share individual reports when one report is shared this is something that the admins need to be monitoring
50:32 Because again there’s no way to you can’t turn that off. There’s not a turn off of that feature. So someone could go to workspace, you can share the report, but then this whole back to the question here, right? If you share a report from a workspace, the user who’s consuming that workspace needs to have access to the workspace to go get the report. That’s just not a good practice here. I don’t really like that experience. Yes, it’s permissible. Yes, you can do it. I don’t love it. So this is where admins need to come in and actually have reporting and analytics around here’s all the items in my tenant. Here’s all the items in workspaces. okay, what has been directly shared and then addressing
51:08 Or talking to those teams and making sure that that’s getting solved and fixed. I don’t think you can stop it entirely, but at least having someone with the awareness of like what’s going on. The other thing is too, people build stuff in my workspace and share it from there as well. Also not cool. Like, so that’s another that’s another report that’s another culture thing that’s inside the company that I don’t want to encourage. I would I would arguably say we need to go find those things and either kill those connections or start telling people to turn it off. I think as an admin you
51:40 Could actually sever that connection. You could just not share those things anymore. as well anyways those are things that I’m like don’t like those things. Now hold on let me just go one more point here. We’ve moved up to in the in our scoping of things, right? We’ve we’ve talked about read and export. We’ve talked about read and copy edit reports. and then now we’ve talked about basically building reports from scratch. So all these three things or org apps, workspace apps, those are sharing there’s permissions in there that allow you to let users create their own content on those existing semantic
52:14 Models. Okay Mike I think the last one too is something that you actually you’re one of the seven in fabric right now but to me there’s this other side too. Everything we’ve also talked about too is a wide array of of content of artifacts, right? Where with the app it’s not just a few, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of reports, a lot of content. But there’s also this thing that has been always seem to be like a lot of developers have seen never been able to achieve and that’s an embedding solution where I just want to be able to view
52:47 Things simply. I I don’t need to view it in the PowerBI in mainframe so to speak and it’s in bedding which is one something Microsoft’s really focused on and Mike not to pitch you up here but I’m going to give you a bit of a softball here. You have a great application too and something that a lot of people can work on too is there is this other idea here around for a larger audience that may not be part of your ecosystem too. It may be B2B and I think this is a big one people talk about or it’s my free users
53:21 Who only need three reports like I don’t need 17 that I just want them to view the to to literally bare bones on just viewing the content here. there’s embedding th this is this is to me an untapped potential for a lot of organizations right and so when I look at how to do PowerBI embedding one it’s let me say this way it’s easy to power embed and right now the embedding experience really focuses on the PowerBI report experience but Microsoft has added recently more ability to do other
53:56 Things in there as well so for example embedding will allow you to create a report you can copy reports. Once you get into embedding, you have all the APIs. So, you have the ability to build flexible experiences around this. Now, look, I’m going to be perfectly honest, right? Embedding is not for the faint of heart. If you are going to be doing embedding in your organization, you’re going to need an app developer to help you go through this experience. If you don’t have a dedicated person for a for a longer period of time, you’re not going to want to do embedding. However, what I will argue is, and again, this is one of the products that I have. I’m on the Azure marketplace.
54:28 I’ve built this. I’ve done over 30 embedded solutions for organizations and I’ve taken 30 different projects over 5 years of of like knowledge and like really distill down what I think are the core features that companies need inside embedding. A simple dashboard, the ability to create bookmarks, the ability to allow users to copy a report and edit it on their own, the ability to let users create new reports from scratch. Right? There’s a there’s a whole really rich experience here. And so right now I think a lot of embedding this is I think
55:00 This is the miss in my point. A lot of organizations are focusing on embedding for their external users. That’s great. It’s definitely the right way to go. You can incorporate these things but think creatively about this. You can also embed for your internal users and that’s super powerful for your organization. You can do single sign on through your Microsoft identity provider. You can make this app that just it’s easy. And so, , we’ve built a solution and a lot other teams have also built solutions. I’m part of the Microsoft accelerators for embedded solutions.
55:34 Well, you can take something that used to take 6 to 9 months to build and you can now distill that down to an hour. You can you can be embedding things within 1 hour with a full solution. user access, report access, pageionated report access, creating your own pageionated reports, editing, exploring data with tables, like the the the experience there. You can really build a premium level experience for users to interact with their semantic models and data. And so this is one area that I’m like, okay, this is an untapped, very
56:09 Green field potential area that more organizations need to get in. And I think of it this way. Day one when you start working with PowerBI and that that first run is you you buy powerbi.com you just get it working right you build the solution after you have practices people are finding value from it you’re getting the reports going then you take a step back and you start optimizing how do we best optimize the licensing the distribution like other things and to me that’s where embedding comes into play where you buy dedicated fabric capacities and then you start cost
56:42 Optimizing down to what people actually need and you can start pairing ing back some of the features to start saving money and being more cost effective. So, I think it’s great. I’m going to put the the link to my application just down in the in the window here. It’s I think a great solution. If you’re not checking it out now, you should definitely check out a lot of other organizations or things around like embedding. you don’t have to go with me. There’s a lot of cool tools out there, but I’m super excited about the embedded space. And I think this solves a lot of this question’s problems. you can build experiences for just read and export. You can build experiences for copy and
57:15 Edit reports and you can build experiences for reports from scratch on top of existing semantic models. It’s awesome and it’s not just because I’ve done 430 episodes with you and you’re my friend. But no, I to me it’s always seemed to be like a holy grail for a lot of people doing embedding and it’s been the most straightforward that I’ve used. I’ve used worked with other clients myself. But I think you you raised an interesting one about the be like in your own organization because to me the embedding still it’s best place is usually with external customers right
57:49 Where they’re not in my tenant so I need to make something accessible to them but with the same security and a betting does that if I wanted to do a security group if I wanted to do hey these users can see these reports and betting works and your tool made it really easy actually with the list but that’s all available but it’s interesting when you say if if I’m dealing with my own organization and maybe when it’s a larger organization and maybe from an executive point of view they they’re brought to that link for for an embedded solution there are a lot of use
58:23 Cases there and I think for a lot of people the question is what type of experience do you want for your wider organization right do you want from a data culture point of view from where they’re at And what they want to see is what what are you trying to achieve? If you want the bare bones, if you want something that’s here’s the reports, here are things that maybe has certain security around, then yeah, embedding it could be a great solution. I I still myself personally, Mike, would lean towards can I do proper training and support to build the data culture up?
58:57 , I wish the thing that just I struggle with today is I wish I could I wish I could have two experiences for users. Actually, they talked about this. Microsoft actually had this they’re they’re planning to release like the two different user experiences and I wish I could customize this where it’s like, hey, for this security group, they’re going to see PowerBI home, they’re going to see apps done. That’s that’s all they can see. For this security group, they can see X, Y, and Z. Because for me, Mike, it’s really important that first impression. , especially because
59:32 Again, it’s I know I said this at the beginning and I know we’re getting at time. This to me, this type this question I love so much because I said this at the beginning that is that the end of the day was just trying to view reports. That’s not the case. This is a data culture question. And maybe most of them are, but to me, this is about how people are actually being able to access, consume, and act on their data. How do you make that the most straightforward? How do you make that the mo the most positive experience for your organization? And every organization is going to be different
60:05 Because where they’re at. And for this person, they’re asking for the most bare bones way. There are a lot of solutions to do that. But I think regardless, the biggest thing is to the really the biggest thing is it’s not just the link or the way you get them to that, but do you have the proper support and training and education for the team? Because no matter what, even if it’s the easiest embedded solution or the hardest power fabric experience, if people don’t have a proper place to go to ask questions, if you just give them a link
60:37 To something, you can’t expect them to figure it out. So really, I’m going to end with saying you must have the proper foundation in place with the proper education in place for anything to actually work out. Yeah. there’s an interesting chat going on here in the in the discussion area and I know we’re just about at time here so we’ll wrap here but one of the things I just really just get dissolution Ryan around there’s this requirement regardless whether you’re powerb.com whether you are not powerb.com you’re in embedded or whatever whatever the experience is there’s always this need to schedule the report right I want to
61:11 Schedule this thing to email to me and I just I I with everything that’s in my fibers I totally people who ask to email me the report or email me the data. I don’t understand. I literally don’t understand. Like let me let me give you the reasoning. My reason in the past has been this was a useful feature when it would take me 5 to 10 minutes to run a report in business objects. That was that was that was the that was the that was the mentality, right? If I had to go to
61:43 Business objects and run my report and it would take 10 minutes to run, I don’t want to go to the web portal and hit go and have it chew for five minutes and then spit out a table that I could then go export. So that’s lame. Don’t like it. But when we build data into a report that is interactive and it’s always up to date and it loads within seconds of it running, there’s no reason to email you the thing. What are you doing? like I don’t even understand why I need to email you the report. So, , to me like this is
62:17 Just it’s an old way of thinking. That’s not reporting anymore. And we we as the data culture that we’re driving here, we need to push people to like look, I understand you want the the report emailed to you. Now, there is a valid use case here that when you’re asking for data to be emailed to you, you’re taking that Excel file, you’re bringing it down, you’re putting it on your machine, and then you’re shaping that additional data and joining it with new things. Okay? There’s better ways, too. Not disagree with you, Tommy. There’s also better ways. But my point is when I even when I when I hear that I that is a
62:51 Valid use case. I’m going to take this table of data and I’m going to continue to add and shape it and do other things with that information. Fine. But we really don’t want to email things. Emailing stuff, it just clutters up your email inbox. We want to point people to links where the real report lives, where the real pageant report lives. It needs to be in real time. So, I just really disagree with this whole whenever someone gives me a requirement of like, can you just schedule the report? No. you’re building it like you’re you’re enforcing a behavior that’s wrong. We need to as a data culture drive for
63:26 People to No, you go to the portal, you go to the interactive report, you go look at the data because that thing, whether you look at at 8:00 a.m., noon, 3:00 p.m., it’s always up todate. Email’s already saturated enough with a bunch of junk. Yeah, James, I agree with you. It’s already saturated enough with just communication in there. Why you need to be dumping your data in there as well? That doesn’t make sense. Those two worlds should not blend together very well. Anyways, I’m going to get off my soap box on that one. I can’t stand that request. , I really want organizations to challenge that mentality and think
64:00 Differently and think about how to solve that problem in a different way. Okay, final thoughts on this one. Main topic today. , F64 for free users. There’s lots of different ways you can solve this problem. I’d highly recommend looking at SharePoint and Teams embedding. I think it’s a great opportunity here. Keep people out of powerbay.com the portal as long as you can to simplify the experience. Embedding solutions, there’s a lot of them out there. There’s cheap solutions out there as well. So, don’t feel like you have to spend a ton of money to go do this. Embedding is going to be or Yeah. Well, and I would also
64:34 Argue if you’re going to sp like honestly if you’re going to buy a $300 month solution for embedding versus like buy build your own, build your own is going to cost you like hundreds of thousands of dollars to go build it with a developer or developers to save yourself like $300 a month. Like how many $300 a month could you buy to just do this? Like so I I think I think there’s a cost trade-off here of like do you buy, , buy or build scenario? And I think right now the the reasoning is so compelling to just do the buy the buy scenario instead of build it from scratch. Anyways, that’s aside, but it exists. So, I really want you to encourage to look at like
65:06 Embedding embedding solutions that are out there. Go educate yourself on that. That’s a big win. , and then the last point I’ll note here is user personas. Think about how your users are going to consume your content. Do you like read and export? Do you like copy and edit? Do you want to have them build their own reports from scratch? Do you want them creating semantic models? Think about your audience and what they need to do. So, , I really if you if you do that, I think you can then better cost optimize and provide the right solution. Tommy, any final thoughts for
65:39 You? No, I I think I already said mine. I I agree completely with you. It’s the audience to me and it’s the proper Agreed. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We really appreciate your time today. We know these are fun topics and we’re talking so much AI. We’re trying not to do that all the time. Hopefully this was a bit more centered around PowerBI specific features and capabilities. Thank you so much for watching. We appreciate your ears. Please share with somebody else. If you found this conversation useful and helpful, Tommy, where else can you find the podcast? You can find us on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your
66:11 Podcast. Make sure to subscribe and leave a rating. It helps us out a ton. Share with a friend since we do this for free. And we listen to your mailbags. The beat of where we know where you guys are at is based on what the mailbags that you send to us. So, if you do want to submit a question, idea, or a topic, , head over to powerbi.tipsodcast, leave your name and a great question. And finally, join us live every Tuesday and Thursday, 7:30 a.m. Central and join the conversation on all PowerB or no, crash landing on all PowerBI.
66:47 Social media channels. You got to like look at the words, Tommy. Like, how many You’ve done this 400 times, Tommy, and we still can’t get it right. I could I know that was great. Oo, squirrel. thank you all so much and we’ll see you next time.
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