Integrating Power BI in a company with local files

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I'm an intern and for my internship I have to do a Power BI implementation at a medium-sized company. The management needs to get a grip on their reports and therefore they want me to create dashboards from Excel-based datasets. I already have some testdatasets en some dashboards, that's not the issues. My problem is that I can't figure out what the best way is to set up Power BI for this company.

They want their dashboards on a tv screen (full-screen), this will only be available in the web version of Power BI. So the local files need to be connected with the dashboard on the web. For what I can see I have to set up a gateway to connect those data sources with the power bi dashboards on the web. Is Power BI Pro then required? And did I do my research correct? Is this the right way to connect the data and implement Power BI?

I hope you can help me, because I'm stuck at the moment.

Thanks,

Tim Hellegers

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Yes you are correct about the Gateway.  You'll need this on a server inside your network as its going to be the secure channel to let the Microsoft network get access to your companies network.

Set the excel files up on a Shared Network folder that your development PC and the Gateway server have access to.  Talk with your network team and see if you can have them set up a service account for you, so you can assign Read-Only permissions to this username and have the password not change.  Use this in your Power BI authentication places for reading the files.

If your reports are going to be designed and displayed only on a single TV, you could probably get away with hosting the PBIX file on the service of a "My Workspace" for a specific Office 365 account for that purpose.  Since you won't be using the Share option, you could do this with a free license.

Your challenge will be how the reports refresh.  If your data files don't change often, then the reports can likely "catch up" by having someone reload the reports.  If your excel files will get new data constantly, you will need to come up with a method of having the "refresh" button on the Power BI Service menu get presses.  If you make use of Dashboards, instead of reports, you won't have this issue.

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much! This will clear things up for me.