PowerBI.com content package for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 includes an entirely new integration with Microsoft Power BI.

In Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016, using the new Power BI Content Pack, Microsoft Dynamics NAV end users can connect a correctly configured Microsoft Dynamics NAV instance to PowerBI.com and immediately be able to see full business performance insights in a dashboard.

The PowerBI.com content package for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 empowers you to share and present data across an organization. Data can be defined centrally but be consumed, modified and presented to the local needs of users, while everybody still sees data from the same overall picture.

Benefits:

• Business performance dashboard  Data from Microsoft Dynamics NAV is presented in an easy-to-use dashboard, providing a complete overview and important insights


• Finance and sales insights  Users can drill into more details in the sales and finance reports, facilitating decision making


• Personalizing the insights  Users can create a personalized dashboard from the existing KPIs and charts in reports


• Modify and extend With this package, users can start using and exploring their own data using Power BI in just a few minutes. The dashboard gives users KPIs and charts on their sales and finance data. The setup consists of three easy steps:

Users can create their own KPIs and charts, select data from queries, set filters, select visualizations and more to create their own dashboards

• Sign in to PowerBI.com.


• Select the content package for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.


• Connect a Microsoft Dynamics NAV instance to the content package. Today I will discuss about below:

It takes less than five minutes to get going! Depends upon net speed and volume of data.

Preparation:


Make sure OData Service is enabled and Port for same is defined in your Server Instance of Navision. Also you use valid thumbprint and SSL is enabled.


Check that the Page 197 Service powerbifinance is published in Web Services window. Copy the OData URL we will be requiring it while connecting to content pack for Dynamics 2016 in BI.

 

Go to PowerBI.com and sign in or go through the easy account setup process.


Sign in to Power BI using your credentials.

You first get to a page to select your data source.

The data sources are OData feeds, such as OData web services from any Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution.

• To import your Microsoft Dynamics NAV data into Power BI, you need to have permissions to the tables where data is retrieved from, in this case sales and finance data. You sign in your account credentials.


• The Power BI Microsoft Dynamics NAV content pack uses Microsoft Dynamics NAV's web services to retrieve your data. If you have a lot of data in your Microsoft Dynamics NAV instance, a suggestion to minimize the impact on your web service usage is to change the refresh frequency from the current default which is once a day to only refresh on weekdays or every other day depending on your needs. Another suggestion is to have one admin create the content pack and share it with the rest of the team instead of having every admin in your organization create their own

In this case select Services to get to content packages. Refer below how to connect.


Select the content package for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.


You will be prompted to add the URL to your Dynamics NAV instance. 

An easy way to obtain this URL is in Dynamics NAV to go to Web Services, find the powerbifinance web service and copy the Odata URL, but leaving out the “/powerbifinance” from the URL string. 

When you paste in the copied URL, you must remove the last part of the web service-specific URL: “/powerbifiance” – you only need the company-specific part of it

After entering the URL You will be prompted to select an authentication method. 

Select the appropriate method and provide the relevant user credentials.


Here you provide the OData URL we saved above. Enter your Authentication Mode and provide your User ID and password to get connected to the data.

When you select Log on, it will take a few minutes for the content package to connect to your Dynamics NAV instance, get the data and create the dashboard and reports.

Troubleshooting

 

"Parameter validation failed, please make sure all parameters are valid"

If you see this error after typing your Microsoft Dynamics NAV URL. Make sure the following requirements are satisfied:

- The URL follows exactly this pattern https//instance.navserver.com:7048/DynamicsNAV90_Instance1/OData/Company('CRONUS%20International%20Ltd.') replacing " instance.navserver.com" with your NAV Server name, “DynamicsNAV90_Instance1” with your NAV Server Instance name and “Company('CRONUS%20International%20Ltd.')” with your NAV Company name.

- Make sure all the letters are lower case.

- Make sure the URL is in 'https'.

- Make sure there are no trailing forward slash at the end of the URL.

 

"Login failed"

If you get a "login failed" error after using your Microsoft Dynamics NAV credentials to login, then the account you are using doesn't have permissions to retrieve the Microsoft Dynamics NAV data from your account. Verify it is an admin account and try again.

Let’s see what data exactly this page provides:


Depending on whether you use your own database or the demo database, the charts in the dashboard might have different content or none at all.

 New Post with details available, please check out : https://msdynamicsnavashwinitripathi.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/microsoft-power-bi-part-vi/

 

We will see rest details in my upcoming post.