Power BI Introduction
Power BI is a reporting and business intelligence product and platform from Microsoft. Power BI is comprised of several software products that work together to provide a comprehensive reporting and BI environment. The desktop product, Power BI Desktop, is part of CSU's Microsoft A5 license for faculty and staff. It is NOT part of the Microsoft A3 license that students have. If you have a student employee, you can work with RAMtech to upgrade them to the A5 license for an additional cost.
More details about Power BI and Power BI Desktop are available at this link below. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/power-bi-overview
The Power BI environment at CSU includes the following products and terms.
- Power BI Desktop - a Power BI report writing application for creating interactive reports.
- Power BI Report Builder - a Power BI report writing application for creating paginated reports. These are non-interactive, multi-page reports, similar to most WebFOCUS reports.
- Microsoft Fabric - an Azure cloud reporting environment that extends Power BI from a desktop tool to a more collaborative, and enterprise reporting platform.
- Fabric Workspace - a folder-like space in Microsoft Fabric where you can share reports, interactive and paginated, data models, and create ETL (data) pipelines. Workspaces have a security layer that allows you to control who has access to the Workspace and what level of access they have within the Workspace.
- Power BI Gateway - a software gateway that acts as a bridge, allowing secure access to on-premises data sources from Microsoft cloud services, like Power BI / Fabric.
The Division of IT is in the process of building a Microsoft Fabric environment for CSU System reporting. We plan on providing reporting data as semantic models hosted in Fabric based on the data in the ODS. If you're building reports in Power BI, we recommend using the Fabric hosted semantic models as opposed to importing the data into your report. We're also building a library of canned reports based on the canned reports in WebFOCUS.
More details about Microsoft Fabric are available here, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/fabric-power-bi .
The reporting data and canned reports are organized into Fabric Workspaces based on data domains (finance, HR, student, research, etc.). If you have access to one or more of these data domains in the ODS, your permissions will extend to the Fabric Workspace and any data that's available in Fabric based on your ODS access level. The naming convention for the DoIT managed Workspaces is "DOIT_PBI_****_DATA", where the asterisks can be replaced with the data domain, finance, HR, directory.
You can start exploring Power BI Fabric at https://app.fabric.microsoft.com/ .
For questions or support requests, please contact the Data Warehouse team at, doit_data_warehouse@colostate.edu