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jakeryan56
Helper III
Helper III

PowerBI Robots - Does Microsoft plan on doing something similar?

Recently Devscope release PBI Robots. I have played with the trial and am very impressed.
However, before I go and spend over $1000 on this software, does Microsoft have something similar planned? I.e. the ability to broadcast reports to a web link, schedule PDF emails of reports, etc?
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Greg_Deckler
Super User
Super User

There are currently some similar features, Publish to Web, save as PowerPoint and you can subscribe to reports to get a screen shot sent when the data refreshese. Other than that, I am not currently aware of anything that would replicate that functionality. However, I would check the Ideas forum and see what is currently in progress or planned.


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34 REPLIES 34

SA,

 

Thank you for your response. I’ve actually implemented both of your assumptions. I have 100 reps that receive 4 reports tailored to them by using the filter option so that each rep will only see their information. With that said, I’ve increased the “Max Timeout” to 300 max and increased the “Delay Render” option to 50 sec verse 20 seconds in hope that this will help. I might even break up the playlist to only 5 recipient and increase it until the playlist fails.  I’ll post my update in the next day or two in hope that I finally get this to work😊.

 

Bobi

Interesting. My thought is that you might want to go all the way to a playlist per individual rep, as annoying as that might be. You can duplicate playlists, as I'm sure you know. That won't save much time but it would help a little bit. Unfortunately you'd have to edit each playlist individually later on if the time period changes, for example, a new financial quarter, and your report doesn't isn't designed to be able to change over automatically. You should send a note to the DevScope support team, I sent them a question early on and they did eventually reply (a couple of weeks later). They've also commented on my posted product improvements on this thread and have implemented some of my thoughts in future product releases. (I imagine they had the ideas themselves, I'm not claiming credit, most of them were obvious, such as the ability to reorder visuals in a playlist.) So actually I would imagine they'll just read your comments on here and perhaps factor into a future release.

 

Let us know how it goes! If you're able to get where you want to, let me tell you, the Robots product is amazing. I have it humming, and the automated reports I distribute with it are incredibly valuable at our company.

Thank you SA_NYC.

 

Indeed we read any suggestions to improve our products here in the forums and pass them on to our development team. You can also send me a private message with any questions or suggestions. We're here to help.

Our end objective is to take the print out of the pdf file that we received in eMail via Power bi robots. 

PDF/Print output is not in proper format due to the page setup I think. Is it possible, to change the page setup because.

  1. Report page in pdf file covers only 50-60% of the page and it looks very small/difficult to read the numbers
  2. Some scenario, we want to split the one report page into two pdf pages ( top contains charts/graphs and bottom of the reports contains table format output)

 

Also I am getting below error message when I applying any page filter 

"Error getting page filters!"

 

Regards, 

Peter I

Hi, Peter.

 

Our support team informed me that your issue is resolved. Can you confirm it?

 

Thank you

Yes, i am getting an on-time response from the support team. 

Still in the discussion to close out this issue.. thank you

Thank you, SA_NYC. I've passed your suggestion on to our developers.

Thanks SA_NYC 

your post was very useful. 

Hi friends,

 

I try to play this tools , now it's work but I had a lot of problems Azure's permissions. In these days will try to check and if you like I will explain my testing.

Also I sent question to customer services but i didn't have answer, mmm....


Mik.

Greg_Deckler
Super User
Super User

There are currently some similar features, Publish to Web, save as PowerPoint and you can subscribe to reports to get a screen shot sent when the data refreshese. Other than that, I am not currently aware of anything that would replicate that functionality. However, I would check the Ideas forum and see what is currently in progress or planned.


@ 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

Power BI Robots is NOT associated with Microsoft. If you subscribe and allow them to connect with your Power BI Organization Portal, it means you are allowing them to take all confidential data/information from your dashboards and reports.

 

I won't prefer to make a connection from PBI Robots to PBI server or cloud services.

 

Please feel free to add.

 

Thanks.

Hi, Shubaham.

 

The only information collected on the PowerBI Robots web application is the user's email when a new account is created. That email is used to identify the user and send him or her notifications regarding PowerBI Robots such as updates or policy changes. The PowerBI Robots agent doesn't collect any personal information. All information used on the PowerBI Robots agent is stored locally, on the user's infrastructure. 

 

The images and PDFs are always generated locally on the computer running the agent. There is an option to generate slideshow visualizations and, in this case, the generated images are uploaded to an Azure Blob Storage owned by DevScope, although we can make available a feature to upload to your own Azure Blob Storage. If you generate PDFs or your target is filesystem, the generated content is stored on the local storage or where you specify it.

 

There are two points in time when PowerBI Robots asks you for your Power BI credentials: when configuring the Agent and when creating the playlist. It only asks for credentials because the only way we to display and generate images form Power BI is to use the powerBI SDK and we need to provide Power BI with a security token to access its data. This security token is returned by the PowerBI SDK and is always stored as a session cookie locally with an expiration date and according to OAUTH protocol. Your browser will use this token/cookie stored locally when you are creating the playlist, and the agent running locally will use this cookie when rendering the images.

 

Hope that helps.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hi DevScope, Thanks for sharing the details. It seems good if I download the agent in my local but what about if I go thru Web.

 

Like in attached screenshot, I can create a subscription directly on Web and it is asking for the Permissions to access my all Workgroups/Dashboards/Reports/Datasets etc.

 

What about the data confidentiality here. 

 

Thanks,

ShubhamUntitled.pngScreenshot_1.jpg

PowerBI Robots requires you to use both the desktop and the web agent. The latter is used for playlist configuration while the former is where you set everything up and make it run directly from your computer.

 

PowerBI Robots needs all those permissions because that's what you're going to select to send though it, via email, to a SharePoint library or file sytem. The authentication token generated by accepting those permissions in the web agent is only stored in your browser and never in our servers so your confidentiallity is 100% guaranteed.

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