Microsoft Teams Is Becoming More Powerful with Power BI

Microsoft Teams provides several options for integrating popular services into tabs. One of these is a Power BI report tab. You can add a report from any workspace that you own or is shared with you as a tab on your team channel. This is awesome! We will show you how to start using this powerful function by adding the Power BI tab to Teams.

How to Add Power BI Report Tab to Microsoft Teams

You can add a Power BI report tab in Teams by simply adding a tab in a channel or chat. Click here to learn more. At FMT Consultants, we took a different route since Power BI did not offer this capability previously.

We needed to take it a step further and allow for some configuration of the report before adding it. Our requirement was to embed the report into a tab using user-specified criteria for filters. This way, when a user accesses the tab in the team channel, it is pre-filtered to the relevant content. The out of the box application for Power BI does not support this. Instead, each time you access the tab you would have to re-configure the filters to see the data you are looking for.

The solution looks like below:

The user populates the report id, workspace id, and optional filters to be applied. They can also choose to show or hide the filter panel when the report is rendered. Once they confirm and save their choices, they are prompted to enter their credentials to ensure they have permissions to view that report. If they can successfully authenticate, their pretty pre-filtered report will appear for them. See below.

After a tab has been set up for a channel in a team, they can return to this tab at any time and see the report with its original settings. To re-configure, they can return to the settings page and edit their selections. You can have as many different report tabs in a channel as you need!

What is Required to Leverage This Capability?

The solution required us to leverage the Microsoft Teams SDK, Power BI User Owns Data, Azure Active Directory, and Azure Functions. Essentially, we built a web application that used Power BI’s User Owns Data scenario and hosted it within Azure’s app services. Then, we created a custom Microsoft Teams application with a tab that features our web application. The report that is rendered in the tab reads from the Microsoft Teams context variable which contains instructions on how to embed the report.

Enjoyed reading this article?

Check out our blog article on Teams: Top 10 Microsoft Teams Questions from Customers.

Curious about modern, efficient, and optimized communication and collaboration tool? Ready to deploy the powerful Microsoft Teams or Power BI?

FMT is here to support your business and the transition to Microsoft Teams. Contact us today or give us a call at 833-827-4275 to learn more.