Dynamics Portal visualizations: embed Power BI vs Standard Charts
Just like in Dynamics 365, Microsoft provides Dynamics Portal with standard chart capabilities, that can display different types of data. These Standard Charts are great, except…they are static.
If your client needs to have a rich and interactive data, then I recommend embedding Power BI visualizations to Dynamics 365 Portal.
In this article, I will compare Standard Charts and Power BI charts, mention pricing options to help you decide whether you need to integrate.
Let’s take a closer look on Standart Charts on Microsoft Dynamics Portal.
Standard chart
That’s how the standard chart looks like. All dataset forms are located on the back-end. Therefore, you can’t filter it dynamically (because all dynamic actions take place on the Portal, which is a front-end).
This way of representing the data is suitable when you need to show the static reports, like a year report or info about your whole organization.
But what if you want to show a user-specific data on the chart? That’s where the PowerBI can help you.
PowerBI integration
Voila, this is a completely different matter. PowerBI lets you connect and pull the data from almost every possible source.
In our example (see screenshot), we took data from the Web site with statistics of each American State. And we can display data for the State of current logged in Portal User, from New-York in our case. In such a way, you could take any data from Dynamics 365 to filter for a specific user.
Moreover, you can interact with this report in various ways and see all the data you want. It also supports cross-filtering, meaning that the filter you apply for a specific chart will be applied to other charts. You have full control of your report interactions via the PowerBI desktop/web application.
You can also apply dynamic filters to the report on the Portal. To implement it, you need to customize your Liquid template. Let’s see:
1. Initial setup
In this example, we are capturing the URL with dynamic filtration to open a PowerBI report for each specific user. We are passing the user’s State field as a filter parameter in URL and PowerBI reflects these parameters.
It is very flexible: you can pass whatever data you want with your logic, in different orders, and with different logical parameters. To see the full list of available filtering functionality, please refer to Microsoft Docs.
The only thing you should worry about is its pricing. To make ‘power’ tag work in your template, you need to go through the number of steps of Integration and pay a good price (10$ for a Power BI Pro license + 750$ for the cheapest storage possible + amount that will depend on the report’s interaction activity on the Portal).
2. Integrate Azure Application with Portal
1. The first thing is to buy a Power BI Embedded license
2. Secondly, you need to create a security group in your Azure Portal and add there Portal’s application
3. Then in your Power BI, you need to add this security group in dev settings
4. The last thing is to manage your Power BI Workspaces in Dynamics 365 Portal App
To see more detailed instructions, visit Microsoft docs.
3. Pricing
Let’s take a look at the steps we need to pass to accomplish the desired result.
First of all, you’ll need at least one PowerBI Pro license to create PowerBI reports
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
Secondly, you’ll need storage for your report’s data. You can change Its size in the setting of your Azure Power BI application.
Here is the price chart for our example. It may depend on the number of reports and it’s data size.
Conclusion
Power BI is a great service for presenting your data as an interactive chart. It is much more flexible and customizable than standard charts. Its main advantage is the ability to apply dynamic filtering of the report. But for such flexibility, you have to pay a considerable amount.
Embedding Power BI Visualizations to Dynamics Portal is more suitable for a large business, for which this integration is an integral part of maintaining the life of users on the Portal, rather than for small customers, for whom this functionality will be more auxiliary. In any case — we will be happy to help you with this integration!
This article originally appeared on UDS Systems Blog by the Team.
