Microsoft Power BI Updates: Groupings; Mobile apps; Azure AD & Analysis Services; Premium Capacity

With August in full swing, Power BI users continued to digest some of the updates from July, including generally available aggregations, a different UI for Power BI Service, roadmap updates, on-prem data gateway changes, a capacity testing tool, and others. Program manager Amanda Cofsky highlighted August updates to Power BI Desktop including grouping features first announced at Microsoft Business Applications Summit. Grouping supports moving and resizing sets of visuals. The August release comes with a slate of other changes, such as conditional formatting warnings, filter pane auto-updates, SAP HANA HDI container support, basic analysis for Facebook pages and a connector for PostgreSQL DirectQuery.

The August 12 release of Power BI Mobile apps makes it easier for users to access PBIR reports thanks to an integration with the Azure Active Directory Application Proxy. The goal of the update is to make reports more broadly accessible outside of an organization's network or servers. Azure AD adds single-sign on, PIN-based login with Intune and multi-factor authentication, thus extending protection to on-prem Report Server endpoints.

As Microsoft prepares for the full implementation of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 in October, Azure Analysis Services can begin accessing files in ADLS Gen2 through the Blob API, as part of the public preview of Multi-Protocol Access. All Blob storage features will be available in this approach, including hierarchical namespaces.

Program manager, Swati Gupta, ...