Office 365 Power BI is now Generally Available

If you did not hear this week, there was a big announcement that Power BI has now moved into General Availability for Office 365. Please read this announcement - http://blogs.office.com/2014/02/10/power-bi-for-office-365-now-available-to-do-more-with-business-insights-in-excel/.

Now you may be wondering, what is this actually mean if you actually own Office 365 or SharePoint Online Plan 2? I actually found this table right here gave the exact answer I was looking for - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/pricing.aspx#fbid=qNWaVwao6BA.

The core features of Power BI for Office 365 you get:

• BI Sites
• Scheduled Data Refresh
• Enterprise Data Search
• Data Stewardship
• Mobile BI
• Natural Language Query

So if you are an existing E3/E4 customer, you get those features.

Remember with SharePoint Online Plan 2 you already get BI solutions such as Excel Services, Power View and Power Pivot reporting through the browser, etc. For more information read the Service Description here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint-online-insights-service-description.aspx.

Additionally with Office ProPlus and Excel you get Data Discovery & Access, Data Modeling & Analysis and Visualization which equates to Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View and Power Map.

So you may be asking, what are these new features. I have pulled together some quick references for you to read:

• Power BI Site - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerbi/default.aspx
• BI Sites – Here is a good article that speaks exactly to Power BI Sites - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/power-bi-sites-on-power-bi-for-office-365-HA104097290.aspx.
• Scheduled Data Refresh – Here is a good article here - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/schedule-data-refresh-for-workbooks-in-power-bi-for-office-365-HA104180761.aspx. This solution is heavily tied to the Data Management Gateway. I have blogged about it before and you should check this out - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/introduction-to-data-management-gateway-HA104079171.aspx.
• Enterprise Data Search – Several new features that allows to search for data across your organizations and the public internet. This solutions serves of as a foundation for identifying data sources.
• Data Stewardship – This is a role of a person in the organization or organizes data sources, manages data definitions, publishes data assets, etc. There are several administration screens and solutions for them to manage data across the enterprise. For more information, I recommend reading this - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/understanding-the-role-of-data-stewards-in-data-management-HA104079191.aspx. I highly recommend reading through these - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/data-management-experience-in-power-bi-for-office-365-help-HA104079156.aspx.
• Mobile BI – There are apps and web pages rendering support so that reports can be published and accessed across mobile platforms.
• Natural Language Query – I have not dug up an article on this but is a new natural language query capabilities which allows users to ask questions to get answers. Users will enter questions and then Power BI will interpret and generate answers using interactive charts and graphs based on available data.

Frankly I need to spin up on this a little bit more, but wanted to get some quick information out to folks…