Skip to main content
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Earn the coveted Fabric Analytics Engineer certification. 100% off your exam for a limited time only!

Reply
Anonymous
Not applicable

Simple Wallboard Displays, not so simple.

I'm looking to solve what I initially thought would be a simple internal problem. I didn't think I'd be the first to want to do this, so I'm posting with the hopes that someone has already worked this out.

 

We have numerous wallboards (40+ inch TVs) all over our company. Exec offices, warehouse, marketing, production, etc. Each dept wants different powerbi 'screens' to rotate thru their respective displays.

 

Examples: Warehouse wants to know the count of orders left for today vs how many they did yesterday. Marketing wants to know how many tweets in the last hour. And so on....

 

I'm looking to embed all this in an intranet site. Which sounds simple until I started digging. I know there are 3 ways to embed. The publish to web obviously won't work as we don't want company metrics availible to the public. This leaves Rest API and PBI Embedded. These both leave me with issues:

 

1) For costs, I'd like to use a single PBI account as a service account to access all the info. As it will need access to all Dept reports, dashboards, etc. This is an issue depending on #3's answer.

2) PBI Embeded pricing model. Some 'screens' don't need to update more than 8 times a day. Others I need to throw live data and update every 5 minutes. I'd rather not have a huge increase in costs to simply show metrics on our walls.

3) Do I have my Dev guys just create a simple web app that calls the embedded data? Can that be coded to call specific defaults reports/dashboards, or does the user simply default to one and user interaction is required to change?

 

None of these displays will be interactive. Hell I've even considered maybe scripting screengrabs at this point. I feel like there should be a simpler way to display non interactive data to wallboards. I've got other non powerbi solutions, but our company really wants to stay with the uniformity of it.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

When in Reports area and on a report in the Service, go to File and then choose Embed in SharePoint Online. Then you can use that embed code in SharePoint Online, there is a special web part for it.


@ me in replies or I'll lose your thread!!!
Instead of a Kudo, please vote for this idea
Become an expert!: Enterprise DNA
External Tools: MSHGQM
YouTube Channel!: Microsoft Hates Greg
Latest book!:
Mastering Power BI 2nd Edition

DAX is easy, CALCULATE makes DAX hard...

View solution in original post

7 REPLIES 7
ian_brown
Regular Visitor

We're looking for something similar - a wallboard that rotates between a set of reports, some PowerBI, some from Jira, some from other sources.

 

We want this to to work in a non-interactive way, with the boards refreshing automatically at appropriate intervals.

 

 

Greg_Deckler
Super User
Super User

Are you using SharePoint Online/Office 365? If so, you could use a special embed code for that.


@ me in replies or I'll lose your thread!!!
Instead of a Kudo, please vote for this idea
Become an expert!: Enterprise DNA
External Tools: MSHGQM
YouTube Channel!: Microsoft Hates Greg
Latest book!:
Mastering Power BI 2nd Edition

DAX is easy, CALCULATE makes DAX hard...
Anonymous
Not applicable

We have the abillity to use Sharepoint, but we are not. We are on O365. My coworker has been pushing for it for another project. If there is a link on how using embed codes with PBI to do something like this, even if its not exact I would love the example. We would absolutely be open to using Sharepoint to solve this.

 

 

When in Reports area and on a report in the Service, go to File and then choose Embed in SharePoint Online. Then you can use that embed code in SharePoint Online, there is a special web part for it.


@ me in replies or I'll lose your thread!!!
Instead of a Kudo, please vote for this idea
Become an expert!: Enterprise DNA
External Tools: MSHGQM
YouTube Channel!: Microsoft Hates Greg
Latest book!:
Mastering Power BI 2nd Edition

DAX is easy, CALCULATE makes DAX hard...
Anonymous
Not applicable

Thank you!

 

I'll give this a go and see how it works.

 

 

Hi Chris,

 

Have you been able to setup this solution?

 

As it would be nice to share as we have a similar requirement where we need to show on wallboard displays across the whole company:

  • Specific static dashboard
  • Auto refresh 
  • Non interactive (just to show metrics)

 

As Greg's solution is sort of ok but not responding to all your requirements.

Embedding in SharePoint is fine, but it will always show the lateral SharePoit menu, and the web part is containerized in a certain size not fitting all the screen. Also this will work for reports but not for Power BI dashboard.

 

I would be interested to know if you've find a solution.

 

Thanks

Kind regards

Anonymous
Not applicable

Wow I'm sorry I didn't reply to this sooner. We in fact did and didn't resolve the issue. We had worked on custom web app and a firefox plugin to display the reports we needed. And it worked well for about a year. Then something changed is Raspian, Chromium, and PBI where the login for the PBI service account would no longer be saved beyond 30 days. So screens would show the login instead of the actual report. I tried every trick I knew, and it wasn't working. So.... we actually started testing screen capture.

 

Yeah I know, totally weird. But when we sat down it made more sense. We need to display google anaylitics boards, PBI, 3rd party dashboards, etc. It was getting out of hand. So having ONE single system with saved login taking screengrabs and updating  jpg files was MUCH easier to maintain. (We are using PiSignage, which is not free but we feel is worth it. We could have stuck with my homegrown Raspberry Pi solution, but it was getting out of hand to maintain.)

 

Yet as I type this, the screengrab is now grabbing the login screen for PBI again. So we still have not solved that problem. But at least I just need to go to one system for a temp fix.

Helpful resources

Announcements
April AMA free

Microsoft Fabric AMA Livestream

Join us Tuesday, April 09, 9:00 – 10:00 AM PST for a live, expert-led Q&A session on all things Microsoft Fabric!

March Fabric Community Update

Fabric Community Update - March 2024

Find out what's new and trending in the Fabric Community.