Introduction: Power BI and SharePoint Reporting

In the past, if you wanted to pull data from databases and/or enterprise software, you needed to reach out to your database administrator, software architect, or 3rd party provider. Perhaps only they have the skills to provide you with an extract of the raw information. Very often, (and with a lot of hair-pulling!), this data would be manipulated, in Microsoft Excel, for example, to provide the necessary reports needed. If you were lucky, perhaps you could reuse the formatted Excel sheets and formulas, or worse case, you had to go through the whole ordeal the following week. Very often, it is a live snapshot of data that you wanted to see or report upon; not stale information by the time you logged the ticket, received the information and finally, manipulated the reports. For business today, it's all about live and real-time reports and dashboards to stay competitive.

BrightWork offers incredible reporting capabilities across SharePoint site collections giving you visibility, clarity, and control of your projects. You may want to incorporate some of that information into business dashboards; combine projects data with operational data in real time from various sources e.g. project data from SharePoint, vendor costs from SAP, accounts from QuickBooks, and so on.

There are lots of tools emerging over the past few years to help with data mining and data extraction. The most popular tool I get asked about at present is Microsoft's offering called Power BI. Power BI integrates well with many of Microsoft's technologies and applications, as well as 3rd party products that are continuously growing. I foresee a lot of development in this product by Microsoft over the coming years.

At present, Power BI only queries individual lists and not entire site collections or a site hierarchy. This means that if you wish to report on projects in SharePoint, this must be done one by one. As projects develop and mature, it could be hard to manage as any new sites created need to be added to the BI queries and again may need to go through that ticketing process. If you have a large portfolio of projects, using many different sites all engineering by many different people, this will become an unmanageable nightmare.

BrightWork and Power BI

This is where BrightWork can really stand out! You can create a dashboard to query a project office, for example, the project office metrics list. The metric list at project office level is a roll-up of all metrics in the subsite (project sites) underneath in the hierarchy. Imagine a dashboard on PowerBI that pulls in all your Planned, Actual, and Remaining costs for all your organisational projects that updates as and when your SharePoint Project sites update. This would combine and report on costs from any project tracking planned, actual or remaining costs in a task list, issues list, risk list, and so on.

Remember! BrightWork has advanced SharePoint reporting features out of the box! BrightWork includes cross-project charts and reports with real-time portfolio dashboards in SharePoint as standard.

As an overview, you can track and manage your projects within BrightWork. Allow the teams to collaborate, project managers to control their projects and senior executive to get the visibility into their projects. By incorporating with Power BI, the information contained within BrightWork can increase that visibility and control by combining the data with other enterprise data.

Power BI and BrightWork Example

Taking an example where a project's planned and actual costs are calculated at the level of a project and aggregated up to the project office, this information can be pulled into Power BI and included in more complex cross-enterprise reporting.

Over the coming weeks, I'll prepare a more in-depth blog that explains this process in more detail and a step-by-step guide on how to pull BrightWork data into Power BI. Watch this hyperlink! If you do have any questions, or would like to see this in action, please request a demo today or comment in the box below on what you would like to see.

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