Power BI Product Family

Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Rob worked at Microsoft for 14 years where he designed technologies for Microsoft products and... more

Power BI is Microsoft’s BI product family that enables customers to share refreshable reports among users. It includes refreshable access to on-premises data and has several interactive features for self-service analysis. For most organizations, the service is likely more timely and secure than distributing business intelligence (BI) reports by e-mail and less expensive than a remotely accessible on-premises BI solution.

Service Overview

Power BI is often thought of as just a hosting service for reports, but it includes the following components, most of which are integrated with or being used by SQL Server Reporting Services:

Power BI service, an Internet-based platform for sharing refreshable reports
Power BI Desktop, a Windows desktop report design tool
Power BI portal, a browser-based client for user access
Power BI mobile applications for Android, iOS, and Windows.

Microsoft’s BI roadmap states that its objective is to harmonize report types and BI capabilities across SQL Server, Excel, and Power BI.

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