With the obvious impact that Power BI brings to data analysis and visualization, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement stands to benefit from a few pre-packaged features available.
Not only we can bring CRM information onto Power BI, but we can also easily present Power BI elements inside Dynamics 365. So, it’s a win-win situation.
To make things easier for us all, the great guys at Power BI sat down and created two specific Content Packs for Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement. They are the Sales Analytics for Dynamics 365 and the Customer Service Analytics for Dynamics 365.
Sweet, this these content packs in place, a Dynamics power user can start creating their own personal dashboards in CRM and share them with the team. This is where the beauty is, as you don’t need a developer or administrator involved once the content packs are made available.
Of course, you will want to leverage the support of your Power BI specialist to configure and extend the content packs to better fit your business, but once that’s done, Bob’s your Uncle.
So, let’s start at the beginning. Log into you Office 365 instance with a user that has permissions and license to Power BI. From the available apps, select Power BI.
I’m not going to talk about the online vs desktop version, or any more advanced features of Power BI. The focus here is solely on getting the visualizations into a Dashboard in your Sales or Service app. For more advanced Power BI topics, the team is doing an amazing job at publishing videos and tutorials.
With your Power BI online open, go to Workspaces and create a workspace for your Dynamics 365 work. You can name it anything you want, maybe related to the Dynamics instance you are going to present data to. I named mine generically Dynamics 365.
Now select the workspace and go to Get Data at the bottom. Click on it.
Here you can either connect to a data source manually and import data, or take the easy way out and leverage the content packs. Click on Services > Get.
In the AppSource pop-up you can now see a lot of available Content Packs. So, at this point you could be thinking “I can bring data in from other sources too”. You wouldn’t be too far off, but let’s come back to the task at hand. That is: Sales and Service.
Type in the search box Dynamics. That narrows down your results. You’ll see packs for multiple products in the Dynamics family, but we’ll just focus our attention on the first two:
Select either one you want to install first. I’m doing Customer Service Analytics, since I’ve already installed the Sales Analytics one. Click on Get it now.
Now you’re guided through a wizard to configure the connection to your Dynamics 365 organization. Pop-in the URL to your organization and click Next.
If doing this the first time, you’ll be prompted for authorization also. Select oAuth2 and provide the credentials to the user with access to the data.
Et voila, the content packs are installed. It takes a little bit of time to sync data, but once complete you should be able to see in your workspace the selected content packs.
If you go to the Datasets tab, you will find the option to refresh data manually, or configure automatic refresh.
And finally open a dashboard to see the various elements available.
Now, the Power BI part is done. You can relax and go back to your Dynamics 365 app.
Do note that, your Power BI and Dynamics 365 must be in the same instance in order to be able to have this integration working properly.
In the next post we’re going to be looking at how to leverage this dashboard elements and surface them in your Dynamics Dashboards.
Enjoy!
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