The Power BI Administrator role is about to be renamed to Microsoft Fabric Administrator. What does this really mean? Is it more than a name change? You bet it is! We know that the Power BI Admin Portal is becoming the Fabric Admin Portal. We also know that the entire Power BI infrastructure is the starting basis for Microsoft Fabric. Meaning that…We can see that the scope of administrator responsibilities is expanding to include the foundation of the Fabric SaaS platform.

An updated version of the Power BI End-to-End diagram is now available. You’re welcome to download a copy from my Diagrams page.

Matthew Roche and I are joining Adam Saxton and Patrick LeBlanc on the famous Guy In A Cube live stream! We’re going to chat about Power BI adoption. And we’ll tackle questions from the audience.

I’m thrilled to be co-presenting a full-day pre-conference session with the one-and-only Matthew Roche. We’ve announced new dates for where we’ll be presenting The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Adopting Power BI in Your Organization.

If you hear the question: "What's a Power BI app?" you might think it’s a straightforward answer. However, the term ‘app’ is pretty overloaded term in the world of Power BI. This post will help you decode what someone else might be talking about.

This post covers what privileges a Power BI administrator has with respect to accessing metadata and data throughout the Power BI tenant. We cover: tenant metadata, standard workspaces, and personal workspaces.

I have a confession to make. I have to try to not be judgmental when I see one of the old Power BI icons on new content that’s being published. The thing is, the old icons still pop up a LOT on blog posts, social media images, and even advertisements for paid training offerings.

I have some exciting news about the Power BI Deployment & Governance course. I'm thrilled to share that Mike Carlo will be taking over primary responsibility for the course as of Jan 1.

I’m thrilled to be co-presenting a full-day pre-conference session with the one-and-only Matthew Roche. We’ll be presenting our all-day session live and in-person in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday, November 15, 2022 at the PASS Data Community Summit.

Permissions in the Power BI Service are directly managed by content creators and owners - that is, the business users who are responsible for publishing and managing content such as reports and dashboards. It's important to be aware of the breadth of permissions from administration, governance, auditing, security, and user training perspectives. Some permissions are implicitly set when performing another action, particularly the build permission for a dataset, which means that auditing of security settings becomes broader than you might initially think.

Why deliver content with a Power BI app? After all, we have workspaces and we have sharing so why bother with the extra layer of an app?

An new diagram of Power BI Datamarts is now available. It includes the technical components of a Power BI datamart. This blog post includes a brief summary of each technical component.

I’m really excited to share with you that we’re working on a new set of Power BI guidance called “Power BI Implementation Planning.” The vision for the Power BI Implementation Planning guidance is to help customers with the most important actions and decisions that are needed to implement Power BI. The new Power BI Implementation Planning guidance will serve as a bridge between the Power BI Adoption Roadmap and all of the great product documentation for Power BI that already exists.

The tenant settings in the admin portal of the Power BI Service are incredibly important. The tenant settings include a wide-ranging number of things that significantly affect the user experience. It’s really important to manage the tenant settings effectively. In this post I’m going to talk about the process you should go through for reviewing and specifying your tenant settings.

This post includes a list of resources for learning about Power BI administration.

There are some really interesting things on the Power BI release plan. I'd like to call out a few of the top things that I’m most excited about. In this post, I’m focusing on a few release plan items that I think Power BI administrators in particular should be aware of as we head into 2022.

If you spend a lot of time with Power BI, keeping up with what’s new and what’s coming is really important. The release plan is the product team’s official roadmap that’s published publicly. The release plan includes new features and enhancements that the product team is comfortable putting an estimated date on.

There are four ways to think about scope when planning for workspaces in the Power BI Service: (1) What is the content? (2) Who’s the content delivered to? (3) How will the content be managed and by whom? (4) How will the content be deployed? This post covers this one aspect of workspace planning and includes a video as well.

I’m thrilled to announce that the new Power BI Adoption Roadmap is out!

The goal for this new documentation is to help organizations know what is involved with adopting Power BI successfully.

For the most part it’s targeted to orgs who have Power BI deployed to a certain extent, yet know there’s room for improvement. We focus mostly on the harder things that are more difficult to manage than the technology itself.

Certifying content in Power BI should be a very meaningful designation. In this post & video we cover:

1. The two types of endorsements in the Power BI Service

2. What types of content can be endorsed

3. The meaning of certification for data, reports, and apps <— this distinction is really important

I had the chance to join John White & Jason Himmelstein on their BIFOCAL podcast. Check it out!

I’m joining Adam Saxton on the famous Saturday morning Guy In A Cube live stream! We’re going to chat a bit about the newly updated Power BI End-To-End diagram, as well as what the top few challenges are when governing Power BI. And we’ll tackle questions from the audience.

You know Power BI governance is important. And I know you’re busy. Need a little help on what to focus on? Consider enrolling for my Power BI Deployment and Governance workshop. I’m really excited about this format because I think it’s good bridge between random online searching for info and doing a full-fledged consulting project. The workshop includes 10 interactive and engaging sessions over 4 weeks covering a breadth of Power BI governance topics.

The Power BI administrator role is a high-privilege role which should be carefully managed. As with many aspects of administration and governance, this involves having a balance between people being able to get things done and risk of when too many people having elevated permissions. This post & video covers (1) ways we can manage membership in the Power BI Administrator role, (2) how to delegate who manages your Power BI administrators, (3) groups you might need, and (4) how to reduce the number of full-time Power BI administrators which are assigned.

New documentation about what’s involved with migrating to Power BI is available on the Microsoft Docs site.

This post discusses two methods of receiving an alert when a tenant setting has changed in the Power BI Service: one using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and the other using the M365 Security & Compliance Center.

I’m really excited to announce that a new version of the Microsoft whitepaper “Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment” is now available. This post includes a brief recap of the most meaningful changes.

One of the best things to do for your Power BI implementation is to separate datasets and reports. This explains why you should use shared datasets, followed by several tips for making the most of this approach. Watch the video, or read the blog, whichever way you like consuming content the best.

I recently had a great chat with Richard Campbell from RunAsRadio. We talked about data governance, Power BI, and some of the challenges faced with governing self-service BI initiatives.

Data is governed when it is: Trustworthy | Secured | Managed & Audited | Documented & Understood.

Currently there are several ways to interact with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 from Power BI. This post focuses on getting data using the data connector without the use of dataflows.

Welcome to my new website! I’m Melissa Coates and Coates Data Strategies is my new company launched September 2019.