Power BI in BB CRM

Todd O

Our institution is transitioning from SSRS reports to Power BI. We are hosted in Azure. Is there a getting started resource anywhere similar to the old SDK guide? We've been able to embed a power BI report using the blackbaud CustomComponent Blackbaud.AppFx.Platform.UrlSectionClient.UrlSection but thats as far as we are at this point.

permissions: With SSRS, when users with permission to the page ran a report it just worked. Where Power BI has its own separate permissions, is there a best practice way to set this up when the main, possible only, consumption of these reports will be in CRM?

auto-rotating passwords, multiple environments: this is something else that just worked with SRRS. I would guess a single shared connection all reports use to limit to one touch point? Not necessarily an issue for non-production environments to show production data but does anyone have it point to the environment its in like SSRS does?

Rebecca Sundquist

Hello, @Todd O. Some time has passed since you posed this question back in January. I came across your post when I was searching to see if anyone had found a way to skip the initial “sign-in” that Power BI requires the first time a user views any Power BI report in CRM.

Have you made some headway on your Power BI work that you'd like to share as a follow-up for our Community?

I can respond to some of your other questions, assuming others are also finding this post and having similar questions.

Q1. Is there a getting started resource anywhere similar to the old SDK guide?

A1. BBCRM Read-only Access Informational Presentation - Blackbaud Community

Power BI Learning Overview | Microsoft Power BI

Q2. Is there a best practice way to set this up when the main, possible only, consumption of these reports will be in CRM?

A2. As a Microsoft product hosted in your organization's Microsoft tenant, access to Power BI reports is managed with Active Directory. Add AD Groups to the workspace where you publish your reports. If Reports should be accessible to different groups, consider managing multiple workspaces to specify different AD Groups.

Q3. Auto-rotating passwords, multiple environments

A3. If you are referring to password rotation for the Read-only database access, this would be managed for online report refreshes (i.e. Power BI Service) with a data gateway. Create a data source on the Gateway for each database. Under Report > Settings, select the proper data source in Gateway Connections. This is where you must (manually) update the passwords on each rotation date. The data gateway is covered in BBCRM Read-only Access Informational Presentation - Blackbaud Community. Also see: On-premises data gateway - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Multiple environments: Consider using parameters in Power Query Editor so that you are not referencing hard coded server and database names. Save your workbook offline as a .pbit template file. When you open the .pbit file, you'll be prompted to fill in the parameters with the proper server and database. In this way, you can quickly populate your template with either Stage or Prod data without manually updating each Query's Source step in Power Query Editor. You can also update the parameters in Power Query to promote the connection from Stage to Prod.