Announcing Power BI Search in SharePoint home, Office.com, Microsoft Bing, and Windows

[Bill Baer]

Power BI is the Magic Quadrant Leader among analytics and business intelligence platforms and over 200,000 customers around the world use Power BI and bring 40 petabytes of data into Power BI every month ¹ and now, we’re building on that momentum with Power BI in Microsoft Search.

Microsoft Search transforms the way people in your organization find the info they need—no matter where you are in your cloud journey. Either integrated with Microsoft 365 or as a standalone solution, Microsoft Search is a secure, easily managed, enterprise search experience that works across all of your applications and services to deliver more relevant search results and increase productivity.

With Power BI search in Microsoft Search we’re making it easier to find Power BI artifacts such as reports and dashboards, by expanding the ability to search across these artifacts in your favorite productivity apps including, Office.com, Microsoft Bing, and the search box in SharePoint.

Power BI search in Microsoft Bing

Power BI search in SharePoint

Power BI search expands the tenant-wide search scope through a built-in powerful search experience with Power BI content, to intelligently help search user to find the most work relevant information more productively.

• Built-in experience: Seamless out-of-box search experience to easily and quickly find Power BI dashboard and report across your organization without switching back and forth between search portal and Power BI site.
• Richer content: Modernized search experience to present Power BI data in the most useful way.  Enrich Power BI search content beyond just hyperlinks to include more key information, such as type, owner.
• Maximize access to information with data protection: Show the search result with relevant Power BI data that’s authenticated to you based on your workplace identity.
• Unified search experience : Cohesive and coherent search experience to incorporate richer Power BI search content in bing.com, office.com, sharepoint.com. Search wherever you want to and get the consistent experience.

FaQ

Can I disable Power BI search ?

Power BI search is enabled for your organization by default. Your organizations’ Power BI admin can disable Power BI search in the Power BI admin portal if desired. In the Power BI admin portal, navigate to Tenant settings and then disable the Use global search for Power BI. To learn more refer to Administering Power BI in the admin portal.

Power BI admin

¹ Source https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-named-a-leader-in-gartners-2020-magic-quadrant-fo...

[Treb Gatte]

@Bill Baer If the Description field of a Power BI Report is filled out, does Microsoft Search index this information and show it in the results? I'm not seeing it but please confirm if this is expected. Thanks!

Description is added in Power BINo Description is seen here in Microsoft Search results.

[Jeff Hutto]

FYI - Most IT managers don't care about whether or not a product is within a "magic quadrant."

Otherwise, this seem pretty handy given the SharePoint sprawl of most organizations.  Finding items without good search functions can be quite frustrating.

[Cindy_Liu]

@Treb Gatte , I'm the product owner of this new released feature. The Power BI search does index and rank majority field value fulfilled in Power BI system but not description field yet as it's a fairly new feature in Power BI product. It's in our product roadmap to add back into the search index scope. Additionally, due to the space constrain on the search result page, we are not displaying the description field for each Power BI search result item, but search user can click and open the Power BI page to see the detail description via the built-in navigation experience. 

[Rob O'Keefe]

@Cindy_Liu how do we know if this is available in our tenant. We use Sharepoint and are early release but I have not been able to trigger this in a search box.

[Cindy_Liu]

@Rob O'Keefe , this feature is enabled by default. If you go to SharePoint.com and sign in with your organization authentication, you will find the new 'Power BI' tab after you start your search query from the top search box. If you are still not able to see the new 'Power BI' tab from your SharePoint search result page, please reach out to me offline, and we'll help to look into it further.

[Rob O'Keefe]

Interesting. If I go to that and login, I end up on www.office.com , I am not sure if that is what you intended. From there, I do get the PowerBI tab you referenced. And if I go to the "Sharepoint home page" https://_tenantname_.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx I also get it.

But we never use either of those pages. When I search from our own Sharepoint page - or any page from our domain -- the PowerBI tab does not show up.

I think it might have something to do with our Hub setup, I am investigating further. Thanks!

[Treb Gatte]

@Cindy_Liu I'd say the description field is more important than the url when both exist. That information scent will help users make the correct choice. If the url is the only information available, then I can see it displayed.

One of the resulting behaviors from this is to ensure Power BI reports have meaningful names.  There may be many Project Status Reports so how do you tell them apart. People have not paid great attention to this before.

Thanks!

--Treb

[Cindy_Liu]

@Treb Gatte, totally agree with you. We are actively working with our partner Power BI product team to incorporate the description field into the search index. Also, really like your recommendation of the meaningful Power BI report names. Maybe we should include it into the feature best practice or playbook.

[Treb Gatte]

@Cindy_Liu a question came up today from a client. Is indexing only getting the pbix name or is it getting each report tab within the pbix? 

Thanks!

--Treb

[Cindy_Liu]

@Treb Gatte , currently we are only indexing the title of artifact, name of the author, name of the group/workspace. We are not indexing the metadata of artifact and content of the artifact. We would like to encourage you to submit your Power BI search index request/suggestion for additional attributes to:

https://ideas.powerbi.com/

[cblaich]

Hi guys,

the verticale seems not to work for us. The current user has a PowerBI Pro Subs with a lot of dashboards. Power BI Search verticale in MS Search does not show anything. I've doublechecked the global search setting and activated it. Another dev playaround tenant with default settings has the same issue. Is there a general problem? The search in that tab runs 4/5 tries in endless loops with loading. 1/5 shows a empty result.

Regards chris