Power BI and SharePoint: How the integration works and its benefits
The integration between Power BI and SharePoint can enable seamless data access, analytics, and visualization with custom automations and flows.
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence and data visualization tool that allows users to understand, analyze, and interpret business data better and faster than with traditional graphs and charts. Power BI users create simple or complex dashboards, interactive reports, and visualizations, making the tool especially useful for salespeople, analysts, IT professionals, developers, and enterprise leaders.
Users can go from examining data to gathering insights from it in a matter of minutes by connecting sources, processing the data, and displaying the outcomes in highly visually appealing reports. Power BI allows users to draw rich insights for a wide range of scenarios thanks to links to a wide range of data sources and types that are continually growing.
Power BI integration with SharePoint for process efficiencies
Microsoft’s Power BI and SharePoint are some of the best-in-class software for businesses that seek to continually improve business outcomes through consistent process and workflow enhancements. Let’s take a brief look at each of them to understand their key strengths.
Launched as a collaborative platform for businesses using the Microsoft Office suite, SharePoint was primarily used to store and manage documents. However, thanks to several updates over the years and the ability to use multiple mini software, SharePoint soon became the go-to content and document management system, intranet portal, collaborative work tool with remote access, and even a personal cloud storage system, proving particularly useful for many small and medium businesses.
Power BI, on the other hand, is a data analytics tool that provides interactive visualization and business intelligence reports. It works with multiple data sets from different sources to carefully segregate, classify, perform comparative analysis, and ultimately, build visually represent the insights from this data along with valuable, actionable prescriptions for leaders to take the right business decisions.
With everything mentioned above, it’s quite obvious how impactful the combination of Power BI and SharePoint can be for your business. Not only can you automate real-time report generation, but also share these reports instantly with multiple teams and individuals.
Advantages of Power BI SharePoint integration
Power BI SharePoint Integration, available as a cloud-based platform in the form of SharePoint Online, plays an important role in helping Microsoft users manage and access their data. It’s a solution that’s been created with all Microsoft users in mind and that unifies different enterprise processes and documents.
Data collection and analysis aren’t the only things Power BI can do. It also helps present different groups of data as a report, employing visual representations to break down raw information into easy-to-understand insights for employees and decision-makers. Users only get static reports when using SharePoint as a standalone platform. But when connected to Power BI, SharePoint allows users to create dynamic dashboards with real-time data analytics and custom visualizations, enhancing SharePoint data management.
Users of Power BI can share live dashboards with everyone in the business. Some of the Power BI dashboard examples include sales reports, customer analytics, global retail analytics dashboards, etc. This way, managers and business heads can see how end-users are using the SharePoint data management with the help of Power BI. When it comes to quickly retrieving information from SharePoint, Excel, Salesforce, and other platforms and applications, this tool can be really beneficial.
Here’s how:
- Integration with non-Microsoft solutions: Integrating Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms to SharePoint and Power BI will make your data more accessible. Power BI connects to 60 popular software packages, most of which are used widely in many mid-sized and large enterprise data solutions. For starters, platforms like Spark, Google Analytics, SAP, and Salesforce can be used to pull data into a unified dashboard. At the same time, cloud servers and hybrid systems have access to your data so you don’t need to worry about storing it on devices.
- API key generation: Installation is straightforward, requiring little to no engineering or IT expertise. Admins can easily generate an API key and put it into the software; this is especially convenient if your company currently uses Microsoft platforms.
- Access control and security: By using Active Directory to set it up, it provides powerful access control and security. Admins can also control which team members have access to specific rows of data on reports based on the position of the employee. Executives, for example, have access to the entire SharePoint reporting data, whereas salespeople only have access to the top ten rows. This saves time by allowing you to create a single report for everyone.
- Ease of user adoption: The learning curve for Power BI is straightforward. The UI components for ease of user adoption will be familiar to anyone familiar with Microsoft products. It’s also simple to export data to other systems like Excel, giving users the freedom to work with their data in different environments as needed. Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups are both easily integrated with Power BI SharePoint Integration.
Power BI is fast becoming one of the most popular reporting tools given that it is part of the Microsoft enterprise suite and integrates with data types from both Microsoft and third-party sources. This demonstrates that SharePoint development services will continue to be a popular choice among businesses in the future, while its integration with enterprise data solutions like Power BI and Power Automate can enable and help scale automation and seamless data reporting and visualizations for businesses of all sizes.
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The combination of SharePoint and Power BI not only ensures that business data and processes are managed efficiently, but also that decision-makers have access to insights behind them which they need to solve real business problems that affect the bottom line. The integration of both these platforms can result in more simplicity, efficiency, and reliability when it comes to processing data and creating a collaborative, digital business environment. Using these tools in conjunction can take business efficiency to new levels with almost limitless customization capabilities.
If you are an existing user of Microsoft enterprise solutions, getting started with SharePoint and Power BI is easier than you imagined. Visit our Microsoft Services page to learn how we help you deploy analytics with Power BI and give your Microsoft 365 suite a brand new edge.
