Microsoft Power BI & Flow Updates: AutoML; Lineage view; Licensing; Visio diagrams

Microsoft puts out a slate of new Power BI and Flow updates throughout mid- and late October. Automated Machine Learning in Power BI, announced earlier in the year, is generally available in cloud regions that support Power BI Premium and Embedded. This approach enables business analysts to build machine learning models, even if they have an extensive technical background in ML. Class balancing, missing value imputation, high cardinality feature detection and cross-validation all serve as "automatic guardrails" for the newly initiated. In the GA version, users have access to a new cost-benefit analysis tool, controls on the time for a training model and a non-Boolean prediction model.

The Power BI team issued the lineage view release coming on the heels of a dataflows diagram view release earlier in the year. Clicking on artifacts will now turn up a side panel with metadata such as the last (and next scheduled) refresh. Other announcements include a new contact list for reports and dashboards, guidance on improving BI, instructions on refreshing a dataset with Flow, or performance monitoring and documentation improvements for on-prem data gateway. 

Over the summer Microsoft issued PowerApps and Flow licensing options available for purchase in the Office admin center. Now add-ons can be allocated in the Power Platform Admin center and used through the Flow portal. Within the Power Platform Admin center, users simply need to click on the Manage option and edit the details.