Post last updated: February 13, 2022 (this post has been updated to focus on 2022 wave 1).

If you spend a lot of time with Power BI, keeping up with what’s new and what’s coming is really important. I know, we're all busy. I absolutely get that - but it’s really important that someone on your team is actively and consistently paying attention so that you can properly plan for what's coming.

This is especially true if you’re a Power BI administrator for your organization, or if you’re supporting others in the organization in some way. Certain changes are pretty big and requires some advance planning or changes to your guidelines, processes, or user documentation.

Be sure to check out this post as well:

What is the Power BI Release Plan?

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.

Navigation menu for Power Platform release plan that includes Power BI and other Power Platform components

The Power BI release plan is included as one component of the overall Power Platform release plan which includes a nice PDF version if that’s helpful to you.

Beyond Power BI alone, there are some shared aspects that are also important to follow even if you don’t use all of the other Power Platform components. Data integration is a good example - it includes the On-premises data gateway, VNet data gateways, and Power Query Online (relevant for dataflows).

Note that most of the areas outside of the Power BI section apply only to Power Platform *minus* Power BI. Governance and administration is a good example of this (and how it’s different from data integration that does span Power BI and the other Power Platform components).

The Power BI Release Plan is Structured in Semesters Known as Release Waves

The product teams do their planning, and make commitments, in 6-month increments. These 6-month semesters run October through March, and April through September. (Microsoft's fiscal year-end is the end of June. I'm sure that has huge internal ramifications on their planning process, but as far as I know it's not directly relevant to us as consumers of the release plan.)

They refer to these semesters as release waves. The most recent release waves are:

2022 Release Wave 1: April 2022 through September 2022
2021 Release Wave 2: October 2021 through March 2022
2021 Release Wave 1: April 2021 through September 2021
2020 Release Wave 2: October 2020 through March 2021

This doesn’t mean that the release plan includes absolutely everything Microsoft is working on. They’re always cooking up tons of things they aren’t yet ready to share publicly on the release plan.

These 6-month release waves are REALLY important, not only for timing but because the release wave is embedded in each of the URLs.

Where to Find the Power BI Release Plan

Watch out for:

These links change each time the release wave changes.

This set of links contains “2022wave1” or “2022RW1” within them.

These links also include “en-us” in the URL. If you prefer to view the localized (translated) version of the page, you can remove that portion of the URL and your browser will detect which localized version to show you. (I’m told most people prefer English since that’s what they’re originally written in so that’s why I left them in.)

Finding the Power BI release plan:

General landing page: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/roadmap/ will direct you to the latest release wave.
Short link: aka.ms/Plan/2022RW1/PowerBI
Full link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2022wave1/power-bi/planned-features which is organized by Premium, Pro, and Embedded. Be aware that the features listed in the Premium section will require Premium capacity or Premium Per User licensing.

Finding the data integration release plan:

This page https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2022wave1/data-integration/planned-features which includes a few areas that are particularly relevant to Power BI like the On-premises data gateway, VNet data gateways, and Power Query Online.

Change history page:

This page https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2021wave2/change-history informs you when something new was added, deleted, or when estimated dates change. (At the time I’m writing this, 2022 wave 1 is so new that it doesn’t have a change history page yet — so this reference is to the previous one: 2021 wave 2.)

Screenshot of Alex Powers' Power BI Release Plan report as of Dec 2021

There’s also a Power BI Release Plan report:

Last (but not least!) Alex Powers (who works on the Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft) maintains a helpful Power BI Release Plan report that aggregates the related items and sorts them by date. You can find his report here: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Data-Stories-Gallery/Power-BI-Release-Plan/m-p/930557

If you’d like, you can even get Alex’s Power BI Release Plan as an app to install in your Power BI tenant. That means you can customize it and connect your own data to take your project planning to the next level.

Public Preview vs. General Availability

On the release plan, there are multiple “states” that an item could be in:

Screenshot of release plan example showing dates for public preview and general availability

Public Preview: The month that the product team anticipates releasing the feature to public preview. (The biggest features usually also go through a private preview process with select customers, but that information isn’t publicly available.) A feature in public preview means that it may still change. Most larger organizations don’t rely on preview features significantly for mission-critical production workloads (though this can be tough to manage for self-service BI since only select features can be enabled/disabled with tenant settings - if it’s there, a lot of people in the org will use it).

General Availability: The month that the product team anticipates releasing the feature to general availability, or “GA.” These target dates aren’t always available well in advance since it can depend on how the public preview goes. General availability means that the feature is fully supported by Microsoft, and that customers can have full confidence in using it for production workloads. We can still expect the feature to iteratively change based on customer feedback and get more mature, but it should be free of major bugs and such.

Released: The green check mark next to one (or both) of the dates means that they’ve released the feature to public preview and/or general availability.

Using the Power BI Release Plan and Blog Together

Not every little thing is documented on the release plan. For that reason, you'll also want to carefully follow the main Power BI blog. The main Power BI blog is vitally important because:

Future plans are sometimes mentioned in blog posts (especially at the end of a post). I’ve noticed that those little "nuggets" of what’s next aren't always formally listed on the release plan. This isn’t official or anything — but I think that if the blog post uses the words “coming soon” that those items will be on the release plan.
There's the big monthly blog post announcing what's new for Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service. There are a lot of new features announced this way that aren’t enumerated or highlighted as prominently on the release plan. (Note: The data gateway, mobile, and Report Server updates are announced separately on the blog.)
The product team has started making pre-announcement blog posts about things coming. That's great to help us plan for future changes. (Here’s one example, and another example, of what I mean by a pre-announcement.)

Advance Notifications for Administrators

Currently there isn’t a great way to get advance notification. In the Microsoft 365 admin portal, the Message Center currently includes some Power BI notifications but not a lot of them in terms of volume.

There used to be an item on the release plan stating that administrators will have a new way to receive advance notifications of new features. Since I originally wrote this post, that item has been removed from 2021 wave 2, and I don’t see it on 2022 wave 1. I also don’t see it removed per the change history. If it comes back — it’ll be interesting to see how detailed these notifications are, how much advance notice there is, and how different the notifications are from the release plan.

Customer who are part of Microsoft’s enterprise voice program would have some insight into what’s coming (all with an NDA: non-disclosure agreement). If you’re a larger organization with a significant investment in Power BI and/or Azure Synapse, talk to your internal BI leadership to find out if your organization participates. If you don’t currently participate, talk to your Microsoft account team to find out if your organization is eligible to participate in the enterprise voice program.