PL-300 – Section 37: Part 4 Section 6 – Create and Manage Workspaces Part 2

278. Promote or Certify Power BI Report or App

Now, that we’ve created an app, how can we say how good an app this is? You’ll remember that a few videos ago, we were able to promote or certify or endorse datasets. Well, as of around October 2020, Power BI now allows you to endorse apps and also individual reports as well.

So, let’s endorse this app. So, I’m in the workspace with the app and I’m going to endorse it. So, let’s click on the dot-dot-dot (…) in more options and endorse this app. So, I can say I want this to be promoted or certified and as before when we were looking at promoting and certifying datasets, you’ll need to have certified enabled. So, I’m just going to promote this. Click Apply and there we go. So, if we now go into the Apps, you can see we’ve now got this little check mark next to this particular app. And we’re sorting by endorsement. So, these endorsed apps go first.

Now, let’s go back to our standard workspace and I’m going to endorse this GetDataImport report. So, I’m going to click on dot-dot-dot (…) and just scroll along, by the way, if I just reduce the size of these columns, we’ll see endorsement here. It isn’t endorsed. So, I click dot, dot, dot. Go to Settings, and here we can see, at the moment, it’s in preview, so this is a trial that Microsoft is doing for this new feature to see whether people like it and whether there’s any problems with it, so I’m going to promote this and click Save. So, now you can see again the check mark is there for promoted, so let’s change that to certified. So, now instead of a check mark, we’ve got a little badge.

So, in addition to datasets, we can now endorse individual reports. Say they’re promoted, say they’re certified or after publishing an app, we can endorse the entirety of the app, not the individual reports but the app itself by going to dot-dot-dot (…) and Endorse.

279. Publish, Import or Update Assets in a Workspace – Publish securely

In this video, we’ll be looking at publish import or update assets in workspace.

Well, we’ve already done a huge amount of that. We’ve looked at how we can publish assets into workplace by going to, for instance, Power BI Desktop, and going to publish to Power BI, you’ll be then given the choice of what workspace you’re going to do. You’ve also got a choice of copying, so we could go to any particular workspace and say this report, I want to copy it into another workspace. We can also get data which pulls in data from other datasets or published datasets, including bills, which are being endorsed or certified or promoted by yourself or by somebody else in your organisation. You can update assets. We’ve seen that you can just reimport files or republish data, but there’s one other thing about publishing it that I really want to mention, and that is how to publish a report onto the internet. So, let’s go to a report and we’ll go to this report here. So, I have the option if a go to file of exporting it to PowerPoint, so I can expose it with current values or the default values, and I can do just one page or all the pages if this was a multi-page report.

So, let’s go into a multi-page report and we can see that we have got that option enabled. So, export to PowerPoint. So, let’s export. So, I could highlight on a certain value for instance, and it will give that filtering or highlighting in the PowerPoint report. As you can see, it might take a few minutes. I can also export this report to a PDF file. So same sort of things. So that is also being done. Here is the PDF. So, you can see how it is being presented. And here is the PowerPoint presentation. So, we’ve got three pages. The first page is an additional page with the last data refresh and the download time at the bottom left, and also a link to view it in Power BI. Obviously, you’d need to be logged in for that and here is your presentation, but I can also embed in firstly SharePoint online if you got that, but also just online standard website. So, here is the content that I would need. So first of all, we’ve got some lots of jumbled letters up here. This is actually a link that we can use to embed the content. So, if I copy that, I can go my website. I’ve got a website here, which is powered by WordPress. So, I’m going to get to the visual editing. And I’m just going to say, this is my link and create a link and then paste it and click Add Link.

Now, obviously this isn’t a course on using WordPress or any other type of publishing software. So, I’m just going to create a title here. So, My Power BI Test Page, and I’m going to just publish it. So, what you do in your own web environment might be different, but I can now view the page. So, here’s the page. Here’s my link. Click on this. And here you can see my Power BI report.

Now, does this work in an incognito page? So, let’s test this. So, there is my link. Click on it. So, you can see for this embedding, I do need to be logged in for the hyperlink to work.

Now, let’s have a look at the other thing that I can do. I can embed the report. So, I’ll copy that. It’s a fairly long piece of text, but just based on what we’ve got previously, and I’ll go into my test page, I’ll edit it now. And this is HTML code. So, I’m going to say, HTML code starts here. HTML code ends here. So, this is my code. And I’m going to go into the text editor. And instead of this is my code, I’m going to paste the code.

Now, obviously you don’t need this HTML code starts here or ends here. This is just for demonstration purpose. So, I’m updating my webpage and let’s view it. And here you can see my report with pages one and two. Again, do I need it to be logged in? So, let’s add an incognito window. So, you can log in to view the reports. So, if I log in, for example, as Jane, so now we can see the report being generated. Again, if I use the link, I’ll be able to see the report. That’s okay if you want this to be a report that not everybody should see. That’s only people in your organisation should see, and you want people to have to log in. In the next video, we’ll look at how to create a public report while you don’t have to sign in.

280. Publish Reports on the Web, so the Public Can See

In the previous video, we had a look at how to create a secure embedding of your power BI visuals, but you need a login for that. What if you didn’t want to log in and wanted anybody to see it?

Now, just before we start, Microsoft keep narrowing down, keep making more secure this export to the web. So, you may find documentation on the web that is inaccurate. So, here is the latest way of how to do things. Well, it used to be that you could do this by default, but now you can’t. And I think the reason why you can’t is that organisations aren’t aware that there is this big hole in that organisation. That’s anybody can export any data to the web, and that could be sensitive data. It could be personal data, security numbers, not what you want. So, what’s happened in recent months is that Microsoft have turned off the way to do this. And they’ve done it in a bit of an unusual way, I think. If you go into the admin portal and tenant settings, then scroll down to publish to web and you can see it’s enabled for the entire organisation. So, you’re thinking, okay, it’s enabled. So, I should be able to do it.

However, look what it says. It’s enabled, but only allow existing codes. So in other words, if you’ve got existing codes, great, if not, you can create any new ones. So, if you want to allow new ones, then you have to click on allow existing and new codes. And again, you can specify who you’re allowing. So click apply and you’ll get the update in next 15 minutes. So, I’m going to refresh this and if you go to view, then we will see an additional option. We had embedded, but now we’ve got published to web enabled this for public access, by anyone on the internet. So, they won’t say securely embed. This one is I want to just publish it. So, I’m going to create an embed code. And it just gives you an additional warning, be careful people will be able to access the report and the data it contains. And also Microsoft may have displayed the reports.

So, basically you have less rights to privacy if you do it this way. So click publish, and there is our links and so far off. So, let’s go back to this page and I’m going to delete what’s currently there. So first of all, let’s create this link. Here is my link and I’m going to gain use just a standard link. So, here it is and at the same time, I’m also going to have my HTML code. So, I’ll click on copy here and you can see that you can also adjust the size. So, you might want a bigger HTML code for example, and you can say what default page you want. So, I’m going to put that in as well. So again, here is my HTML code, here is the end of my HTML code. and I’m just going to replace my codes, wave this I frame.

So again, I’m just updating this, I’ll now view the page once it’s updated, thank you. View the page. So, there is my code. And you can see it’s bigger than what was previously under those custom option now at the bottom, I can share my URL that this is hosted on and it can also Facebook and tweets and all the other things you might want to do. And I can also make it full screen as well. So, this at the bottom, gives me full screen, press escape to exit full screen. But now if I’m not logged in, can I view all that information? And here you can see, yes I can. And also my link works as well. So, this is something that’s if you’re an administrator, you want to be very careful about enabling people to do. Maybe, only enable specific people to do this by exception. So, you can go down to tenant settings and see why you are in the publish to web, so I’ve allowed everybody to do it. You’ve also got an embed codes section. So that’s just here and that shows which codes have been created. And obviously I can delete it, I can view it. I can export the list to a CSV. So, this is a good way of controlling it if you do want to allow people to create those codes. So, this is how you can share your content on the internet to publish it. You go to your report, you go to file and you can either embed securely. Or if you’ve got the option enabled, you can embed less securely. As I said before, please be careful what reports you do publish. Make sure that it’s okay for you. For instance, don’t share confidential information, check your company’s policies before publishing. You might also have things like GDPR or any other governance schemes that you have to abide by. You’ve seen how quickly is available, that you can publish information if you update the report definition. So enough words, you change the model or you refresh the data. Then any updates might take a couple of hours to put onto the web. So, if it’s time urgent, then I suggest doing is ahead of time. And because of that, I wouldn’t use this mechanism to publish something that frequently changes.

Now, don’t publish things like reports with row-level security. You won’t be able to because at least to the way, but for public could use because row-level security doesn’t work if you don’t have any sort of user login.

Now, you may have noticed that I’m not able to publish this to a public website. That’s because of this user’s row-level security. Another reason why you might not be able to do it is if you’ve got shared and certified data set, there are a few other things like for instance, our visuals aren’t supported, ArcGIS maps for power BI. There’s a few of them things.

So, in this video, we found out how to publish assets from a workspace to the internet either securely or for public access. You previously know how to important update assets. And just one other thing, you may find something on the internet about content packs, and that’s a way of publishing information. However, that doesn’t work under the new workspace system. It’s been superseded by apps. So, this is how you publish, import or update assets in the workspace.

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