Last week, Microsoft introduced plenty of updates for Power BI. Some of these include the October update for the desktop version of the data analytics service, while a set of new PowerShell cmdlets has also been brought to Power BI On-premises data gateway. Then, yesterday, the October update for On-premises data gateway was also rolled out, bringing some new features as well as performance monitoring improvements.
Now, new contact lists have been added to reports and dashboards in the Power BI service. Essentially, these are aimed at making the process of contacting experts much easier for end users, for any queries that they might have.
As far as new contacts are concerned, the default ones can now be customized in a variety of different ways. Initial authors can be replaced with other people; if, for example, the original author has switched roles, the current ones can be used to replace them. More people can now also be added, catering to reports that have multiple authors. Office 365 Groups, distribution groups, and email enabled security groups can be included in contact lists as well. And finally, contacts can also be removed entirely, with a workspace level contact list replacing them.
For end users with the New Look for Power BI, item information cards show contact information. These can be clicked for creation of emails having contact email addresses automatically inserted, as in the image above. Moreover, the sent emails provide notifications to everyone present in contact lists for a specific item. The contact list now also displays error dialogs in cases where authors can timely resolve the issue.
More information regarding the additional usage options can be read about at the source link, as well as in the contact list documentation.