Last month, Microsoft introduced a bunch of new features for Teams, including end-to-end encryption, Windows 10 native notifications, and more. With regards to Power BI, meanwhile, the tech giant recently announced that the Report Builder component would be getting rebuilt as an x64 application.
Today, Power BI integration with the Teams activity feed has been unveiled, allowing users to get report sharing notifications along with contextual actions upon shared reports from within the application. Requesting access to owned reports can now also be done in the same way.
Previously, sharing reports essentially meant that an email was sent to the relevant person, with Teams users getting a context switch option to find and open the received emails. Now, those with the Power BI app for Teams installed can get report sharing notifications in their activity feed. Clicking upon the notification opens the report, offering various options such as exporting, sharing, chatting in Teams, opening in Power BI, popping out, and more, as showcased in the image above. Despite getting an email notification in this scenario as well, the Teams application will not have to be left to view the report.
Similarly, users who need to view a report that they do not currently have permission to view can request access directly in Teams. Approval for the request simply requires the notification to be clicked in the Power BI app for Teams, instead of the previous, relatively tedious method of having to leave the application to respond to such requests. Support for multi-select approval when multiple requests need to be handled is also provided.
The latest feature can be configured in the Teams app by clicking on "Settings and more" near the profile picture once a Power BI notification has been received, and then selecting the following options successively: notifications>Power BI>edit. This would open up a series of options, as shown in the image above, that can be altered. For now, though, only "Actions and Updates" - which corresponds to report sharing and access notifications for the activity feed - will work, with the rest serving as placeholders.
For these new capabilities, only reports in workspaces and My workspace are currently supported, with reports in Power BI organizational apps being sidelined for now. In the next few months, Microsoft will be increasing the scope of this new feature to dashboards too, allowing dashboard sharing and access requests to dashboards in pretty much the same way as is the case for reports right now.