SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

Following on from my recent Project Online Power BI report pack post / release, this post looks at publishing the Report pack to the Power BI service, creating an example Dashboard and then finally creating an organisational content pack. For those of you that missed the previous post, please find a link below:

http://bit.ly/2ivjxct

Open up the report pack in Power BI Desktop as seen below:

Click the Publish button on the Home ribbon or Click File > Publish > Publish to Power BI:

Sign in to Power BI if prompted to do so. If you have more than workspace in the Power BI Service it will prompt you to select the destination. Select the destination “My Workspace” as required and click Select, you will then see the following:

Once completed you will see:

Click Got it to close the window. Open up the browser and navigate to http://bit.ly/2l2jWEs. You will then see the published report under the Reports heading in My Workspace and also the report dataset under the Datasets heading. Click the report name under the reports heading and the published report will load:

You can then schedule a refresh of the data. Click the ellipsis next to the report under the Datasets heading:

Click Schedule Refresh. You will then see that you need to enter the credentials used for each OData endpoint used in the reports:

Click Edit credentials and select OAuth2 on the window that opens:

Click Sign In then enter the credentials / select the account as required. Repeat this for all of the OData connections.

**********NOTE: There is currently an issue with updating the credentials in Power BI when the Project Online OData URL contains [], you will probably receive the following message “Failed to update data source credentials.”

I’m not sure when this will be resolved. Alternatively, if your PWA site default language is English you could update all of the report queries to remove the /[en-US] from the OData URL. To do this, click Edit Queries > Edit Queries to open the Query Editor. Select a query from the Queries menu on the left then click Advanced Editor. This will open the Advanced Editor window. In Source remove /[en-US] from the OData URL and click Done. Repeat this for all queries that contain the PWA OData URL, once completed click Close & Apply > Close & Apply. Then follow the steps to publish the report to the Power BI service. **********

Once the credentials are all updated and correct, expand Schedule Refresh and enable this as required:

Click Apply.

Now click the report name under the Reports heading. From here you can pin visualizations on to a dashboard. See an example below:

Click the pin in the top right corner of the visualization then click New Dashboard and give the dashboard a name:

Click Pin.

Repeat this for other visualizations on other pages in the report as required but on the Pin to dashboard menu select Existing dashboard and select the dashboard you just created:

Once you have added all the visualizations you want, click on the new dashboard from the Dashboards heading:

Now you could create the organisational content pack to make this report and dashboard available to others in the organisation. This does require the Power BI Pro license.

Click the Settings Cog in the top right corner:

Click Create content pack:

Complete the form as required and upload an image if needed then select your dashboard – this will automatically include the correct report and dataset. Once completed, click Publish. You will then see a success message in the top right corner:

Other users with a Power BI Pro license will then be able to consume the content pack once logged into their Power BI workspace by clicking Get Data > My Organization > Get:

Click Get it now. It will then add the content pack to their workspace.

Before creating the content pack it would be best to wait until the data source credentials issue is resolved in the Power BI service so that the data in the content pack will update on the schedule. Or alternatively, if your PWA site default language is English, remove the /[en-US] from each dataset query as described in this post.