Power BI Updates & Insights: Shared and Certified datasets; Customized navigation; PBI Report Server updates

At the start of May, Microsoft premiered its Fluid Framework for team collaboration at the Build 2019 conference and a similar approach seems to be taking hold in Power BI with Shared and Certified datasets in public preview. Of course, in the world of data and reporting the comparison isn't quite as exact. Users won't necessarily be collaboratively editing data. But the benefits of centralization may be significant for many organizations.

A catalog of authoritative data will be searchable within Power BI Desktop, with the ability to output to Excel and third-party tools with the XMLA protocol. A combination of audit logs and metric apps will give admins a sense of the usage of different databases and keep track of their lineage. A single dataset may be used across workspaces for multiple reports.

Power BI engineers deployed new features intended to support reporting teams with customizing navigation for end users. The host of small alterations includes the option to change the name of the app so that it will be different than the workspace it's connected to, new theme colors and a way to add-in a support URL.

Workbooks, paginated reports and dashboards all appear in the Navigation builder tab with a details card to customize or rename each item. Sections supports groupings, while Links can setup connections to systems like Dynamics.