Microsoft announced the availability of Power BI for Office 365, a cloud-based service that offers users a new dynamic way to work with data, through tools they use every day, such as Excel and Office 365.
Power BI for Office 365, using all the productivity and Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities of the cloud, helps people easily analyze and visualize data in Excel, and share and collaborate from anywhere with Office 365.
Power BI for Office 365 enables businesses to easily create reports and extract insights with Excel, and share and collaborate on those insights with Office 365. Excel includes powerful data formatting and visualization capabilities that enable customers to easily discover, access, and combine their data. Customers can even create stunning 3D geographic visualizations in Excel.
With Office 365, customers have access to cloud-based capabilities to share visualizations and reports with colleagues in real time and from their mobile devices. They can also interact with their data in new ways to reach actionable insights faster and manage their work more efficiently. Power BI for Office 365 capabilities include:
• A data management system that allows IT managers to create connections to on-premise data sources. End users can have the latest reports, whether on their desktop or mobile device.
• BI Sites, locations on a company’s intranet specifically for BI projects, where users can find and share data and reports with colleagues and collaborate on results.
• Real-time access to BI Sites and their data, regardless of whether the user is accessing them from a mobile device, via the HTML5 browser or via the mobile device app available in the Windows Store.
• A natural language search called Power Q&A, which allows users to ask questions about their data and get immediate answers in the form of an interactive table, chart, or graph.
“Power BI brings together many of the key features of the modern business intelligence paradigm: a public and enterprise catalog of BI data and models, a new way to search for data, a modern mobile and web-first app, rich interactive visualizations, collaboration capabilities, data management tools for CIOs, and a radical natural language experience for data exploration,” said Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President of the Data Platform Group. “All of these capabilities together will not only change the types of insights we can draw from data, but also the extent to which they can be used.”
Many clients are already taking advantage of the service’s capabilities, including Revlon, MediaCom, Carnegie Mellon University and Trek. By
comparison, MediaCom, an advertising agency with 4,600 employees, uses Power BI to measure the effectiveness of its clients’ campaigns in real time. “The fact that Power BI is part of Office 365 is important. All of our employees know how to use Excel. By integrating BI, we don’t have to train them on anything new,” says Lowell Simpson, CIO of MediaCom. “Before Power BI, our company was using complex software that account managers didn’t understand. Not anymore, because all employees can now do more using this familiar tool.”
More information about Power BI for Office 365 is available at powerbi.com.
Source: kathimerini.gr
