Power BI for Office 365 allowed users to model and analyze data, and query large datasets with complex natural language queries. It has been discontinued in favor of other editions of Power BI going forward.
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Microsoft Power Automate
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) enables employees to create and automate workflows and tasks across multiple applications and services without help from developers. Microsoft Power Automate includes capabilities from the former Softomotive, which was acquired by Microsoft in May 2020 to expand the capabilities of Power Automate.
If you're already using Office 365, Power BI for O365 is an easy choice. Start playing around with the free version and then easily add individual Pro licenses with little risk. However, if you anticipate using this with many users, it can get expensive quickly.
Well Suited - Collecting data and organizing it. - Eliminate a lot of admin work. - Send auto-response emails to customers/users. - Notify relevant users when the data is updated. - Creating business process flows. Less Appropriate - If creating a flow to create a pdf file that combines all the attachments into one pdf file. - Flow will fail sometimes if the flow is too long and complex and if the flow connections are changed from one user to another.
Easy to make visual dashboards from SQL queries. Previously we had to use a third party application that had to run on a web server that was so complex to setup and run. PowerBI removes all that.
Ability to control who/which group has access to each dashboard or report. Ties in well with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.
Has many connectors to allow pulling data from various systems, both onsite (via gateway) or external (via APIs), and join the data to create a report/dashboard.
Ability to show data but also export the data, if permitted.
Easy to show PowerBI dashboards on SharePoint or on other websites via embedded code.
"When an item is changed in a SharePoint list, do ____" - very easy to trigger massive flows of data based upon a one-field change on a SharePoint list.
Being able to manually trigger from a Microsoft PowerApp button press to perform actions.
Scheduled tasks - once a day, get every record in (LIST) with (Filters) and do (Stuff) to them.
Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software.
Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version.
Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities.
I think general training could be improved. I'm sure there are many more uses than the simple automation tasks I was using Power Automate for, but I didn't have the time or bandwidth to dig through Microsoft's documentation on the tool.
I will continue to recommend this suite to folks looking for a reporting and analytics solution, as I find in MOST cases, it's great at meeting almost every requirement I've been given by a multitude of clients across a range of industries. I've built Capacity Planning solutions that allowed end user input which was then submitted to SharePoint, Executive Dashboards, custom applications, simple analytical tools for teams to easily slice and dice data, and super simple reports as well as some very complicated ones. If you haven't seen the demos online, do a search, and see for yourself - this is a great BI suite! (I do not work for Microsoft, although I do consult out there from time to time. I do occasionally make a recommendation for a different BI reporting tool, but in general, find Excel can accomplish quite a bit for less money and in less time.)
We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.
For most tasks WinAutomation is great and easy to use. You just set up tasks on a step by step basis and you can even tell the program what to do when there is an error (such as continue with job). Sometimes with complicated web extraction jobs it would be good to be able to easily extract data from the web page source.
as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.
So Microsoft Flow support for its general troubleshooting or correcting issues is excellent. But to my knowledge, Microsoft Flow itself does not have service providers, even though they offer templates on their online app. I have found myself many times trying to complete individual actions that have no known template or even forum example. Every business is unique, and Microsoft does an excellent job of providing versatile yet straightforward systems. Microsoft Flow is definitely on the more advanced side of things. Having support or being able to purchase superior service (on building personalized flows) would be great.
Oracle was nice, super expensive to implement if it's not in use already. JobDiva is choppy and heavy on the system while does not give great reports. Salesforce is good; remote access is good however their support is terrible
Microsoft Power Automate is the first flow-based service that I have used, and I loved its convenience. It does take some time to learn and a lot of research. I recommend that you first plan out how you imagine that the flow should work and change things around as you start creating the flows.
As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.
Power Automate has allowed us to create applications or customer interfaces we would not have been able to if we weren't able to move data around like we can with Power Automate
Power Automate helped us connect 3rd party systems that previously had no connection by passing data between different channels. This reduces license counts.
