Question

Power BI integration guides?

  • 6 January 2021
  • 8 replies
  • 271 views

Do you have any A-Z guides showing step by step how to connect Power BI to my community for reporting/dashboards?

I see a lot of posts mentioning we can use the APIs, but I’m looking for a guide on exactly how to set that up.

Thank you!


8 replies

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Unfortunately we do not have a guide ourselves on how to connect the community to your Power BI. We have our general api documentation, here the link just in case you have not seen it yet:

While I know some communities who work with Power BI, the Community Managers we have contact with probably will not have the knowledge to help you further here.

We are trying however to find you some contacts amongst our customers who can help you, my colleagues will reach out and then get back to you!

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What my colleagues have identified so far is that, to get this to work for you, the regular api will not help you right-away as Power BI does not seem to support oauth 2.0 for access to the api.

What you would need is a middle layer that sits between our API and their power BI instance - one that calls our API, collects data, saves it to a database and then makes it available internally to their power BI instance on a single url.

As this basically means you need to build a custom connector to communicate, there is no one-fits-all solution or guide we can offer at the moment…

So hopefully we can find you a contact or some example documentation that you can use.

Hi @Julian,
Thank you for the previous information. I am just checking again if there is any new update on this. Because we are using PowerBI and  we really need this ability to directly connect from insided platform into PowerBI. That would be a really wonderful feature which many customers would demand. Thank you !

Any update on this?

Thanks !

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Hey @Yasas_AK !

I’ve been trying to look for pre-built solutions to this one for you, but unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be anything that already exists and Power BI doesn’t exist on Zapier nor IFTTT at this time. So unfortunately those options won’t work either.

It might be possible for you to build something in Microsoft Azure that can provide a bridge between the inSided API and Microsoft Power BI to automate the process, or manually export the data you need via CSV Export from Control and then feed that into Power BI from there. But I’m afraid I can’t find anything that can automate any of this right now. In actual fact, it almost looks like you’d have to set up almost everything from Power BI rather than insided, as it doesn’t appear to be one of those platforms that lets you start the process from this side.

With that being said… If you can manage to convince Power BI to somehow talk to the inSided API directly and get it to behave, that is a possible option. But without proper support from Microsoft, I don’t think inSided can do much to make this possible unfortunately.

On the other hand, having looked at the documentation, it does seem as if Power BI has support for importing data from Google Analytics. I know you mentioned that you’d rather not do it that way, but it’s probably the least complicated pre-built connector I could find.

I did find something in the treasure trove that is Microsoft Docs though.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/learn/modules/get-data-power-bi/3-connect-data-sources-power-bi-desktop

If there’s ever one place to find documentation and guides for just about anything Microsoft related, that’s definitely a very solid and seriously good place to look. It’s got a huge amount of hidden gems so you may well get lucky, even if it takes a while to dig through the archives.

I hope this helps you out. I really wish I could have found something that would have been a bit more of a proper solution, but I’m afraid that there’s not much that anyone can do when it comes to stuff that’s not designed with inSided in mind at all.

If you get badly stumped, a Microsoft Partner might be able to help out with something. I don’t know any myself and I’m not really able to offer recommendations as to who to go with. But I’ll leave this here just in case. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/partners/

In actual fact, having looked deeper into this… It almost seems as if most of the pre-built connectors in Power BI were built by Microsoft rather than the services and platforms that it can integrate with. You may want to submit a suggestion to Microsoft about adding inSided to the list.

Thank you so much @Blastoise186 for researching into this and value your insights :slight_smile:

@Julian  Do we have any update on POWER BI integration from Insided ?

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Unfortunately, I do not have any concrete news in this direction. I know that the teams are discussing this, and that we want to focus a lot on integrations later this year, but I cannot promise that this will be taken with. I am a big advocate for this, so rest assured I am pushing for this internally.

I would recommend to keep an eye on our roadmap updates, the next one should be posted here soon!

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