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Provisioning Microsoft Power BI for Office 365

Posted by Errin O'Connor on Feb, 09, 2015 06:02

Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 enables Self-service Business Intelligence for all your data. With Power BI, you get complete self-service BI for your on-premises and cloud-based data by using the new data discovery and analysis features in Excel with the collaboration capabilities in the new Power BI for Office 365 online service.

To administer Power BI, you use the Power BI Admin Center. Before you can start using the Admin Center, you need to provision a Power BI license.

Getting a Power BI license up-and-running is easy taking just two steps to provision Power BI and add users.

Ready to Provision a New Tenant?

  1. Using your Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 promotion code URL, navigate to the Power BI account set up page. Your promotion code URL resembles: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/Signup/MainSignUp.aspx?OfferId={Your ID Code}
  2. In the start your free trial page, enter required account information. After you set up your Office 365 account, your User ID is the Admin ID and your domain is the name of your preview tenant.
  1. In the Don’t lose access to your account page, enter your Mobile phone number, and click Send text message and/or Save and continue. This page configures access to your account if you lose your password.
  1. The Office 365 admin center page displays progress on provisioning the services. Once the current health status for your Office 365 account states No issues, Power BI is provisioned for the organization.
  2. After the SharePoint services are provisioned for a Microsoft Office 365 Plan E3 service, set up user licenses. In the admin shortcuts pane, click Assign user licenses.
  1. In the user and groups page, click your administrator profile.
  1. In the Assign licenses page, select the Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 license and Microsoft Office 365 Plan E3 license. In the Microsoft Office 365 Plan E3 license group, deselect the SharePoint Plan 2 options; otherwise, you will receive a save error. Click save.
  1. In the administer settings Assign role page, update your alternate email address and set your user location. Click save.
  1. To return to your Office 365 admin center dashboard, in the left navigation pane, click dashboard.
  • To get to the SharePoint site to install Power BI, click Sites in the upper right corner of the dashboard page. If you see the We’re almost ready page, your SharePoint site is provisioned but not yet set up. You might need to wait 10 to 15 minutes for site set up to complete.
  • In the new site page, click the Team Site tile.
  • In the left navigation pane, click Site Contents
  • In the Site Contents page, click the Power BI tile.
  • After you click the Power BI app tile, you can click Add samples data to learn about the rich visualizations and insights you can create with Power BI.

Assigning a License to Users

Upon successful provisioning of your Power BI tenant, one of the first things you should do is assign the appropriate license to your users. If you have just completed the provisioning process, you should already be in the Office 365 admin center.

  1. In the Office 365 admin center, click users and groups from the left pane.
  2. Click the + (Add) icon.
  3. In the user management details page, enter the new user information.
  4. In the settings page, enter user settings including whether the user has administrator permissions, and the user’s geographic location.
  5. In the licenses page, check the Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 box and make sure the other three boxes are automatically checked. If not, check them manually. This will assign the appropriate Power BI license to the user in your tenant.
  6. For an existing user, click save when done.
  7. In the send results page, click Create to send the results of creating the user to the administrator, and up to five other recipients.
  8. In the results page, click finish to add the new user.

Note: Temporary passwords are sent in clear text through email.

FAQs and Provisioning

Common sign up error

You sign up using the promo code URL when you are already logged into another tenant.

Tenant restricted for Power BI preview only

You cannot add additional services/subscriptions to a tenant because it is restricted for Power BI preview only.

Navigating to Power BI

You navigate to the Power BI site portal from the Office 365 admin center.

  1. Navigate to https://portal.microsoftonline.com and login using your Power BI user name and password.
  2. Click Sites at the upper left corner.
  3. Click the Team Site tile.
  4. Click Site Contents.

Note: Power BI should be automatically installed for all tenants that subscribe to the Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 Preview. Please note that the tenant installation process takes about 10 minutes.

Note: If you see a Power BI tile, click the Power BI tile.

The next time you use Power BI, you can navigate to Power BI from the left SharePoint Online navigation pane.

Manually Installing Power BI

To manually install Power BI on a tenant scope, you must be a Tenant Admin.

  1. Navigate to https://portal.microsoftonline.com and login using your Power BI Tenant Admin user name and password.
  2. In the O365 menu, click Admin > Sharepoint.
  1. In the SharePoint admin center page site collections pane, click apps and App Catalog
  1. For a new tenant, you create an App Catalog:
    1. A.In the App Catalog Site page, select Create a new app catalog site, and click OK.
    2. In the Create App Catalog Site Colllection page, enter your app catalog properties, and click OK. The minium Storage Quota is 100MB.
    3. The SharePoint admin center page displays Power BI provisioning status. After your app catalog is provisioned, you can view site collection properties. To view site collection properties, click on your new site collection.
    4. Navigate to your new app catalog site using the url in the Site Collections list. The app catalog site is a central site to the tenant that enables you to deploy the app once and have it appear in all sites in that tenant.
    5. Install the app catalog site:
      1. Click Site Contents.
      2. Click add an app tile.
      3. In the left navigation pane, click SharePoint Store.
  • In the SharePoint Store page, if you see a “Please choose an available language …” message, select your language from the language dropdown which is located at the upper left corner.
  • In the Find an app box, search for “Power BI”
  • Click the Power BI tile.
  • In the Power BI app page, click ADD IT. Follow the add Power BI app steps.
  • In the SharePoint Marketplace page, enter your Microsoft account sign in, such as a Live ID, and click Sign in.

In the Confirm that you wish to add the app, click Continue, and click Return to site.

  1. In the Do you trust Power BI page, click Trust It.
  2. Deploy your new Power BI app for the entire tenant.
    1. In the Power BI fly out, click Deployment.

(Next)

  1. In the Manage App Deployments page in the Available managed paths list, select (All Paths) and click Add to add (All Paths) to the Managed paths to deploy to list.

(Next)

  1. Click OK.
  2. In the Do you trust Power BI page, click Trust it.
  3. The Power BI application is installed on the site, click the Power BI tile to start the app.

After you click the Power BI app tile, you can click Add samples data to learn about the rich visualizations and insights you can create with Power BI.

The next time you use Power BI, you can navigate to Power BI from the left SharePoint Online navigation pane.

Introduction to the Power BI Admin Center

Using the Power BI Admin Center, you can control security and access to certain on-premises data sources by allowing authorized users to set up Data Management Gateways, and to register these on-premises data sources, and to expose them as data feeds.

Optionally, you can publish complex data that require advanced data transformation and joins using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages as data feeds. Business users can then connect to these data feeds using Power Query, thereby; making these data sources available in the system.

Only members of the Power BI Administrators group can access the Power BI Admin Center. You are already a member of this group. You can add any other users to this group using the role management tab of the Admin Center.

Accessing the Power BI Admin Center 

  • You access the Power BI Admin Center from your organization’s site.
  • To access the Power BI Admin Center, click the Tool icon, and Power BI Admin Center.
  • You can also access the Power BI Admin Center from the Office 365 Admin Center under the Admin menu.

The Data Management Experience – Intro

The Data Management experience in Power BI provides self-service capabilities to enable business users and data experts to easily connect to a wide variety of data sources, transform the data into the desired shape, and then securely share the data within the enterprise from within the familiar environment of Excel using Power Query.

The business users and data experts can also themselves manage the data sources, and can continuously analyze the usage of their shared data using the Manage Data portal.

You access the Manage Data portal from your organization’s site.

To Access the Manage Data Portal

To access the Manage Data portal, click Manage Data at the left corner of your organization’s site page.

EPC Group’s Nationally Recognized Practice Areas

EPC Group leading Custom Application DevelopmentSharePointOffice 365, Infrastructure Design and Business Intelligence Practice areas continue to lead the way in providing our clients with the most up-to-date and relevant information as managed IT service that is tailored to their individual business and functional needs. Refer the Power BI Case studies 

Additional “From the Consulting Trenches” strategies and methodologies are covered in EPC Group’s new book, “SharePoint 2013 Field Guide: Advice from the Consulting Trenches” covering not only SharePoint 2013, Office 365 and SharePoint Online but Information. Also refer the few free chapters provided here.

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Management, ECM\RM and overall compliance strategies in this ever changing world of “Hybrid IT.”

About the Author

Errin O'Connor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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