Power BI’s support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online broadens access, BI possibilities

When Microsoft announced last month that its Power BI suite of tools would be compatible with queries against Dynamics CRM Online, it may have seemed like just one more line in a press release. But for users and partners, the update was validation that these tools will now reach the fastest growing portion of the Dynamics CRM customer base.

Power BI is a business intelligence tool set that has, since its introduction last summer, enabled Microsoft Office and Office 365 users to query and analyze data - both from their own local and network data sources and mined from external sources like the U.S. Census or data marts. In the summer of 2013 at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft Technical Fellow Amir Netz memorably demonstrated some examples of Power BI (the video has since been taken down), as he said, "bring[ing] self-service analytics to the cloud and to the power of the cloud directly into Excel. It opens amazing new ways for users to connect with data."

Until now, it hasn't been easy (or supported) to authenticate against CRM Online to access its OData feed from Power BI. Technically savvy CRM professionals found workarounds to the authentication problems several months ago, allowing them to start spinning up the technology to do things like mapping web visitor data geographically, with some flashy results.

Brad Koontz is director of product marketing for Greenville, S.C.-based Customer Effective, and he says that since Redmond's support of Power BI with CRM Online last month, he's been impressed with what he's seen.

"What's happening here is in typical ...