To the Planner product team,
The Issue
The ability to analyze Planner data with Power BI is severely lacking. Is there any plan to offer an OData feed for Planner data?
The Graph isn't designed for Business Intelligence
The Graph is not the answer for a number of reasons.
- The MS Graph is not designed for BI purposes and as such, is painful to work with in Power BI.
- You get 429 errors everywhere as you are constantly being throttled for submitting too many requests.
- The Planner API is also hard to navigate and has a lot of not implemented areas, making it unfriendly to the low code developer.
- The Graph requires IT assistance to set up as you have to create an Azure App to get a security token, the Graph has to be on, etc.
- This doesn't work at many large corporations as they restrict access to their "true" development teams or simply don't allow it.
Power Automate workarounds are brittle
Using "Rube Goldberg" solutions comprised of Power Automate and SharePoint are brittle and inefficient. No client wants to implement and maintain hundreds of these solutions.
Competitors like Smartsheet and Trello have elegant BI solutions in comparison. Smartsheet has a custom Power BI connector wrapped around their OData API that is as easy to use as Excel for data connectivity. I want this ease of data access for Planner.
Microsoft helped create OData
OData was intended to provide an easier way for end users to access their cloud data via port 443 and without a need to involve IT to configure. Microsoft was one of the founding members of the OData spec group. Almost every other Microsoft product (even Microsoft Forms!) has an OData endpoint which can easily be consumed within Power BI. Microsoft even has the best documentation on how to build an OData endpoint.
Can we please get a solution to this issue?
