Modern Analytics: A Foundation to Sustained AI Success

The Modern Analytics: A Foundation to Sustained AI Success eBook explores how modern analytics and AI…

Traditionally, “managed services” refers to the practice of outsourcing business functions to an outside organization, with the purpose of improving operations and reducing expenses.

Creating a custom app is a breeze thanks to Microsoft’s PowerApps. Users of any skill level can design sleek applications to service numerous business needs as designing an app now requires little to no coding experience. The simple drag and drop interface in Canvas apps boosts efficiency by speeding up development time, while empowering user allow users ultimate control over the layout and navigation experience of the app. Canvas apps can connect to data in hundreds of cloud-based or on-premises sources. Further, your potential audience can access your apps via mobile devices, web browsers, or embedded in external sources or model-driven apps. The flexible nature of canvas apps expands app designers’ horizons and unlocks new potentials for streamlining business processes.

In our previous Power BI automation blog, we utilized the Power Platform in combination with Azure SQL to store refresh history of our datasets leveraging the Power BI REST API when on a Power BI shared capacity. A solution to manage Power BI dataset refreshes is particularly useful when data source refresh times are variable and end users need to know when dataset refreshes are successful. However, Power Automate and Azure SQL create two failure points. This solution also requires additional licensing cost in Power Automate to leverage premium data connectors to Azure SQL. So, how can we consolidate the number of tools we use and at the same time leverage the security features and access controls that Azure provides?

With Power BI Premium and the Capacity Metrics App, you can track metadata such as refresh statistics of your reports and data sources, as well as additional detail regarding CPU usage, memory usage, and average wait times for a dataset to refresh. Refresh data can be invaluable for users monitoring the health of their workspace and troubleshooting issues as well as IT leaders ensuring proper SLA standards from ETL to the Power BI Report. It also provides transparency and trust to business users to know that the data they are viewing is up to date.

When clients and consultants tackle MBI and MDP projects together, there can often be an assumed \"one right way\" to get the job done. This shared myopic focus for the presumed solution comes both from the consultant and the client side. Oftentimes, consultants may feel pressure to conform to industry-based solution templates, while clients may have preconceived notions about the problem they’ve articulated as well as about the type of solution it requires. But these concerns can truly be benefited by asking for outside counsel and being subjected to external scrutiny.

Metric and goal setting is paramount when formulating business operations. That\'s why Microsoft Metrics (previously known as ‘Goals’) make it possible to keep every member of a team striving toward a singular, unified key objective and ensures a higher probability of positive outcomes. In fact, in this study regarding goal setting and optimism, it is shown that the goal setting process assists individual workers to improve their performance and enhances optimism for business success. So, how can productivity metrics and business objectives be met while also integrating the latest and greatest data analysis technology available? In this blog, we will be performing a deep dive into the world of productivity within Power BI’s Metrics and Scorecards.

Since its inception, Power BI has been a leading tool in self-service analytics. This week at Build, Microsoft released an exciting new feature available to preview – Power BI Datamarts! Power BI Datamarts enable self-service users to build and distribute an analytical solution from end-to-end. Data ingestion and preparation, data exploration and analysis, data modeling, and report design can all be done in a low- or no-code experience in Power BI Service!

While there are settings that you can customize through the menu system in Power BI for a custom theme, one of the settings you cannot edit is to add a default background image to your pages. Here are 5 easy steps to create a theme that incorporates a background image for each page.

Data ingestion is the process of transferring data from its source system to a data store, often a data lake. Efficient data ingestion can be a daunting task depending on the complexity of your data sets. Yet, optimizing performance is a crucial part of the data ingestion process. 

In modern supply chains, the one constant is change. The increasing rates of change have led to new methodologies built around planning for and optimizing agility. In addition, the uncertainty of the past 2 years has highlighted the need for lightning-fast data and analytics for making decisions across organizational systems. To manage this extreme uncertainty while optimizing both service levels and inventory, companies are looking for their supply chains to be more flexible, responsive, and resilient. Supplier diversity, demand forecasting, and end-to-end supply chain visibility have become vital for the survival of modern manufacturers.

Gone are the days when creating a sophisticated app required extensive coding knowledge! Microsoft’s Power Apps empower citizen-developers of any skill level to build custom apps.