Microsoft Power BI & PowerApps Updates: Workspace experience; Community; Analytical workflows; New CDS features

The Power BI team first launched the new workspace experience in general availability back in April 2019, offering upgraded security management, broader roles and a contact list. But on November 22, the team went a step further, issuing an opt-in public preview that lets commercial cloud customers upgrade their workspaces. In this release, workspace admins can choose to upgrade the workspaces they own. For end users, URLs and item identifiers remain the same, along with published apps, data refreshes and subscriptions. Significantly, upgrading doesn't remove Office 365 Groups. The biggest changes are behind the scenes. Workspaces are no longer tied to Office 365 Group and are protected in case the group gets deleted. And content packs won't work any longer, prompting a switch to apps or shared datasets to distribute content.

Product marketing manager Rebar Niemi revisited the recent general availability of Power BI template apps, taking a close look at the LinkedIn Sales Navigator Analytics integration. This supports more comprehensive analysis, reporting and modeling. His colleague shared other update details in the November Power BI community update. A single template can be connected to multiple datasets spanning workspaces with dynamic binding, while a new API generates embed tokens for multiple items, Automated Page Refresh comes to Power BI Embedded and the decomposition tree visual aids in root-cause analysis. In a bid to standardize with the Office experience, an updated ribbon is also in-preview for Power BI Desktop.

But Power BI wasn't the only part of the Power Platform portfolio garnering ...