Microsoft Convergence is back

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 It has been over 10 years since Microsoft hosted their Convergence conference for Microsoft business applications.  It is happening in Miami, FL on December 10th & 11th.  I am lucky to be attending and also presenting a session.  My session will be Using Power Platform to automate the accounting department in Dynamics 365 Finance.  Hopefully you will be attending and have an opportunity to join my session. I am posting my slides here, so if you attend and want the slides, you can get them here.  Using Power Platform slides   Even if you are unable to make the session, feel free to download my slides.
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D365 Finance - Business Performance Analytics

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Microsoft recently released a new reporting / analytic solution to public preview.  The solution is Business Performance Analytics.  They have been talking about this solution for some time, so it is great to finally be able to get our hands on the solution.

To get the directions to install the preview simply go to Microsoft docs. One thing to note is the solution requires a Tier-2 environment and Dynamics 365 Finance version 10.0.35 and PU 59 or later.  As with many of the recent solutions from Microsoft, this solution is built on the Power Platform as a model driven application.   The solution also includes embedded Power BI.  Since there is some good documentation on the installation steps, I will not go through it in my article.  I will take a look at what the solution provides at this point.


As you can see from the screen shot, this solution is very similar to the embedded Power BI that is currently inside of D365.  One of the differences is this data is not coming from the AXDW database, also known at the aggregate entities.  This data is coming from data lake data.  As part of the installation, Microsoft makes the connection to your D365 instances and creates the data model.

At this point in the preview, the only data available is financial.   During the preview, I expect to see Microsoft add more data models and more prebuilt reports.  According to the release planner this solution will not be generally available until February 2024, so I would expect we will see many updates and changes as they receive feedback through the preview process.









While the initial report list is pretty small and the initial reports are locked, so they cannot be changed.  However, it is possible to duplicate any of these reports, or create your own report.  Simply click on the New Report button. 



This will open embedded Power BI for you to create or edit your report.  


As you can see in the screen shot, there is a data model with dimension tables and two fact tables (budget & general ledger).  At this point there is no ability to change or add to the data model, but I hope that will come soon.  Since the data model is already here, you can simply use your Power BI experience to create visualizations on the data.

Business Performance Analytics also includes the ability to secure the data based on dimensions in the data combined with user roles.  It does not read the security from D365, which I find to be typical of analytic solutions as the users may have different reporting access compared to their transactional access in D365.  




You can build your security based on up to five dimensions at this point.  For example, legal entity, department, business unit, cost center, and main account.


You can setup a dimension group that will be assigned to a user to limit the data they see on the report.



Here is a simple example, where the user only sees Legal Entity = USMF, Business Unit = 001 and Accounts = 400000 to 999999


This is just a quick look at the new solution.  I believe over the next six months prior to the general availability release there will be many new enhancements and features, but now is a great time to install the preview and start learning how you can use the new solution.

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