My company, Pragmatic Works, is working through a Dynamics 365 migration. As part of that migration, we need reports. We have made the decision, seemingly obvious given who we are, to use Power BI for all of our internal reporting. Through the process, I have been working with our migration team a lot and have been tasked to handle key reporting for the consulting team. We are implementing both CRM and PSA (Project Service Automation) as part of the rollout. I am responsible for reporting that supports the non-Sales operations for the consulting organization. This series of posts will follow my journey to get a good solution in place. I will give you the resources I used, the advice from the pros on my team, and anything else I can share to help your journey along as well.
I want to caveat that this is my journey through the process. I am sure some mistakes will be made along the way, but we should all learn together. I am not doing this in a vacuum. I have some very talented Power BI team members helping me with strategy and design. Their contributions will be reflected throughout the process, but want to give them credit now for sure.
- Paul Turley – Blog | Twitter
- Andie Letourneau – Blog | Twitter
- Nick Lee – Blog | Twitter
- Bob Rubocki – Blog | Twitter
- Erin Ostrowsky – Blog | Twitter
Evaluating Power BI Dataflows vs Power BI Shared Datasets
I started the process by trying to determine what is the best option for building data models that can be used for ongoing report creation within our company. I was familiar with shared datasets and with the latest improvements in the service, it was a good place to start. However, I have been talking with the team about Power BI Dataflows (and Azure Data Factory Dataflows, but that is not relevant here). I put it out to the group above to discuss pros and cons. Overall, the team pointed out that Dataflows with Dynamics would be the best fit, however, there is not much out there on Dataflows in action.
Brian Knight and I were having a different conversation about the Common Data Model (CDM) and PowerApps for other projects. During that conversation, Brian also mentioned that the CDM was ideal for working with Dynamics data.
Coming full circle, the team agreed that CDM with Dynamics and Dataflows is a good way to go. And so starts the journey. I will be documenting the research and progress along the way here. I will be posting whenever I can. Here we go!
