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I’d like to have a short call with you to discuss the scenario in more details and get you started. Meanwhile, here is a link to the documentation of our Content Pack Certification Program that will walk you through the full process from applying to the program to authoring the content pack to finally submitting it to us: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-developer-content-pack-overview/. Please go over it and have your questions ready so I can answer them when we talk.
The delay so far has been in getting to grips with a number of new technologies for us and trying to get them working well, and with Power BI. But, we now have what we believe to be the pre-requisites working well together:
Anyway, these pre-requisites are up and running. I think the bit we are perhaps struggling with is structuring the queries, the dashboards etc in order to make a useful content pack … and ensuring that the queries from the dashboards (potentially used by lots of users in slightly different ways) aren’t so intensive that they grind the database to a halt (underlying this is a Sybase Database hosted in Azure rather than MS SQL … for historical reasons!).
Is this something that you can help us with – or point us in the right direction? We have someone who has a lot of theoretical skills in data management, including some Microsoft certification, then we have plenty of people who know our database and SQL, but putting this together to create useful content packs in Power BI, that are efficient against the database is I think our current challenge.
We are also interested in using embedded Power BI to replace a third party dashboard product that we have currently embedded in our application … but again, need to understand how this is best deployed in our circumstances.
ALSO, this from the Microsoft Support team
I can provide the following guidance:-
If you wish to customise how your customers view reports you will probably want to move to using Power BI Embedded and the REST API and the other associated packages with Embedded; this enables you to program and embed reports in your web sites.
At the moment there is no concept of roles of users in Power BI which is what I think you were asking about; you would need to create reports for each customer which would then use their corresponding datasets, data sources and database schemas. Dashboards based on snapshots of reports can then be shared in app.powerbi.com to specific users that are signed up to the same version of Power BI as you the sharer.
Those external users could be outside your Office 365 tenant as long as they sign up to same version of Power BI either independently or through their corporate Office 365 tenant.
If they are in your organisation they should be able to self-sign up to your organisational tenant; it should not be necessary for you to sign them up as long as they haven’t been excluded from signing up.
I don’t really have knowledge on how you could enable the users to create their own dashboards without providing the full access to app.powerbi.com service; again it may be possible to do this programming the functionality in Power BI embedded into solutions.
Here are some useful links which may help:-
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-dashboards/
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-how-should-i-share-my-dashboard/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/power-bi-embedded/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/power-bi-embedded-scenarios/
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn950053.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt711507.aspx
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/power-bi-embedded/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/power-bi-embedded-get-started-sample/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/power-bi-embedded-iframe/
