Can I use Power BI to report on the Office 365 system, including all apps, settings? I would like to build (and eventually schedule) a report showing all information that is visible on the admin pages. Is this possible?
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1 Answer
Power BI (currently) does not have a connector for Office 365 system settings, and it does not make much sense to build one, since Power BI is about aggregating large data sets. What would a report like that look like? Setting A is on, Setting B is off, Setting C is set to "text"?? That is not what Power BI does.
Power BI does have a connector to the Office 365 usage data. That is a large data set and that is where Power BI shines.
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/explore-your-office-365-adoption-data-in-power-bi/
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Yes, this is exactly what we need. I thought that Power BI is a little overkill for this small amount of data, but I always try to think out of the box first. Is there an alternative for this task? PowerShell is not really an option as there are new features / settings coming in or changing place and I want something that needs to be built once and follows the changes.– vilmarciCommented Jan 24, 2018 at 17:01
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The Admin portal has all the settings. Why not just look there? What bigger goal are you trying to achieve?– teylynCommented Jan 24, 2018 at 19:21
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Only admins have access to the portal. We need to report on these settings periodically for audit reasons, proving that everything is according to the policies and I cannot expect from the admins to do this by hand.– vilmarciCommented Jan 25, 2018 at 7:58
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Powershell will be your best bet to get the info, since there is no Power BI connector. I'm not even sure you can access the info unless you are an admin, so maybe the admin needs to run the scripts, anyway. Then you can manipulate and present the results with Excel (or Power BI)– teylynCommented Jan 25, 2018 at 9:13
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Thank you for the feedback. Well, as long as it is a single run of a script, and not a manual check one by one, I have no issues with the solution. However, I started such a question a while ago and it died out, so if you have any ideas how to dump all the settings with a flexible script, please share it over there: stackoverflow.com/questions/48212570/…– vilmarciCommented Jan 25, 2018 at 11:58