Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

In this article, I am going to provide ‘Step-by-Step’ details on how to:

• Add ‘Power BI’ subscription to your existing Office 365
• Connect to your ‘Dynamics CRM Organization’ from BI
• Render Power BI reports in CRM Dashboard.

What’s Power BI and How is it different from SSRS?

• Power BI offers basic data wrangling capabilities like Excel’s Power Query.
• It also lets you create interactive visualizations, reports and dashboards with a few clicks and handle files that are too large for Excel.
• On the other hand, SSRS is meant for “static” reports. Something that will be shown always as defined and printable.

Steps to add ‘Power BI’ subscription:

• As a pre-requisite, create your 30 days Dynamics 365 free trail.
• Login to ‘Portal.office.com’ and open ‘Admin’ dashboard
• Go to ‘Billing -> Purchase services -> Power BI (free) -> Buy now
  • Note: This requires you to provide credit card details and INR 2 will be charged after successful purchase.

• After successful purchase, open ‘PowerBI.com’ on another tab of the browser and click ‘Sign In’

• Click ‘Start’

Connect to Dynamics CRM organization from Power BI:

• To connect to CRM Organization from ‘Power BI’, you need to install one of the ‘Content Packs’

• Click on ‘Get’ button from ‘My organization’ section
• From the available list, choose any of the Dynamics CRM related Apps (I chosen ‘MS Dynamics Online Sales Manager’ for this demo, from the ‘Apps’ tab)

• Click on ‘Get it now’ and you will be asked to provide CRM credentials.
  • Provide ‘CRM Organization URL’ details and ‘Last Month Of the Fiscal’

• Choose ‘Authentication Method’ as ‘OAuth2’

• Post successful login, you would see ‘Importing Data’ message

• Give it few seconds and you would see beautifully rendered reports

Display ‘Power BI’ reports in CRM Dashboard:

In previous versions of CRM, only option to bring ‘Power BI’ reports are by placing an IFrame in Dashboard and set the PowerBI URL. Its easily configurable now.

• Connect to your Dynamics CRM Organization
• Go to ‘Settings -> Administration -> System Settings -> Reporting -> ‘Allow Power BI….’=Yes

• Create a new Dashboard
• Select the placeholder and from the Report add options, click ‘Power BI Tile’

• Pick one of the available ‘Power BI Reports’

• Save the Dashboard
• Go to ‘Sales -> Dashboard’ and pick the created ‘Dashboard’

🙂