For quite a while, Power BI was only available in Office 365 through a commercial edition that brought some of the best features available for organizing data. As a business intelligence cloud service, it’s already helped many commercial businesses aggregate, visualize, and share all the data they have. In government, though, data is a far more demanding prospect as you already know.
It’s why Microsoft added Power BI Pro to Office 365 Government earlier this year. However, in doing so, it’s created two distinct programs that differ slightly from one another.
Those of you migrating data from Power BI to the government edition need to know a few things about how to transition smoothly. You also have specific features exclusive to the government version that are going to streamline how you manage data every day.
New Features for Dashboards
One of the great things added to Power BI for government offices is the ability to create your own dashboards. How you view them is up for customization here as well, which includes the way you read reports.
Those of you who’ve had troubles with your previous data management platforms can finally find a way to configure what’s comfortable for you.
In addition, you have refreshable team dashboards. This extends to the standard feature in being able to share your dashboards to any colleague. Using this allows you to share with colleagues outside your group workspace as well.
Data Capacity Limits
Another crossover from the standard edition to government is data capacity limits, even though this varies between free Power BI and the Pro version. The latter is going to give you far more benefits. One of these is being able to store up to 10 GB of data for maximum capacity.
Simply go to “My Workspace” to find out how much data capacity you’re using. With your data capacity, you’ll have your own datasets and Excel reports.
How much data you get is going to vary depending on what you pin to your dashboard. Nevertheless, having your Excel ranges, reporting visualizations, and uploaded images to your dashboard gives you more data integration for immediate study.
Data Refreshes
Another great data feature is the ability to refresh all the information you have so it’s not outdated. The data refreshes in Power BI are either done manually or through a scheduled system. Again, though, the power you have to do this depends on whether you have the free Power BI or Pro.
With the Pro edition, you receive more refresh frequency. In Pro, datasets can refresh hourly. All your streaming data refreshes up to one million rows per hour in Pro.
Only in Pro can you get live on-premises data, plus live cloud data sources.
Basically, you’re able to refresh data up to eight times per day.
Easier Ways to Import Data
Before using Office 365, your government office probably had a lot of challenges importing data from different sources. In this edition, you’ll import all data and reports from Excel, CSV, and Power BI Desktop files.
Being able to do this quickly and easily without any complications has probably been a dream in your office for years. What’s so great is you can use hundreds of different data sources with Power BI. Using Content Packs from various services brings you data and reports already prepared.
Thorough Encryption for Your Data
One thing Microsoft assures you with all their software is their attention to security. Power BI is going to give you complete encryption for all your data. They take this further with Power BI’s Azure SQL and Blob Storage so you’re protected from every angle to prevent cyber theft.
More Information
Keep reading us at cFocus Software Incorporated for more updates and tips on using Office 365 Government.