Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2020 Excitement

Microsoft Business Applications Summit took place online this year 6-7 May 2020 for free. New features were shared and the sessions discussed how to optimize operational processes. I was particularly interested in Power BI. There was an emphasis on Data Culture for every decision. The new features are intelligent and familiar, meet the needs of business and IT, in a unified way, and are ubiquitous, for everyone to have access. Trust is the foundation with BI for collaborative teamwork and BI being woven into the fabric of the organization.

There are some amazing AI features with the natural language smart narratives, being able to suggest questions in Q and A and there is trend analysis automatically generated over points.

The data stack for Power BI collects query patterns and determines materialized views for optional performance. Microsoft Information Protection in Power BI is GA. For admin and governance you can bring you own log analytics. Deployment pipelines are coming as part of the application lifecycle management.

Lineage view and dataset impact analysis are two useful additions to the toolset.  Lineage view recently became generally available. Lineage view enables you to visualize the entire data journey from a given workspace, making it easy to determine the upstream and downstream dependencies of artifacts, examine artifact information, and take action. Dataset impact analysis enables a dataset owner to understand how a dataset is being used within the workspace and in other workspaces. With the dataset impact analysis, it is possible to determine if a dataset is being used in mulitple workspaces, so the impact of changes can be reduced.

There will be templates to help people start with Power BI like other Microsoft products. There were so many other new feature announced. You can watch the sessions from the day on-demand.