Leading High-Performing Power BI Development Teams with Fabric & Power BI Developer Tools

In this session, we’ll explore effective strategies for leading Power BI development teams, focusing on productivity-boosting development paradigms like Agile & DevOps.

Learn how to navigate the Power BI project lifecycle with Power BI Developer Tools (PBIP, TMDL, Fabric Git Integration and more) and plan successful projects with a clear development process. We’ll discuss establishing conventions and standards to maintain consistency across projects and ensure high-quality outputs.

Additionally, we’ll dive into the importance of living documentation—such as data glossaries, data dictionaries, data lineage, and metadata-driven descriptions—to keep teams aligned.

Finally, we’ll cover best practices for managing relationships with stakeholders and end-users, including how to establish a common language for defining metrics and fostering collaboration.

Enabling Enterprise Self-Service BI in Fabric

Enabling enterprise self-service BI in Fabric starts with decentralizing the data estate, giving business units access to high-quality, easily accessible data products. Establishing a Center of Excellence and fostering a Community of Practice ensures teams have the right skills to succeed. By carefully architecting Fabric Domains and Workspaces, organizations can balance data distribution with strong security measures. We’ll explore strategies for responsible data consumption, such as using semantic models, reports, and apps to meet diverse user needs, while also addressing the financial implications, particularly licensing costs, to support self-service BI.

• Data Mesh principles and how they enable scalable self-service BI with Fabric Domains.
• Establishing a Community of Practice for continuous learning and collaboration in BI development.
• How to balance decentralization of BI with centralized governance to maintain security. Architecting & Managing Workspaces in accordance with these principles.
• Streamlining user experience for data consumers with the right BI consumption strategies - Shared Semantic Models, Reports, Apps
• Financial Considerations for Implementing Self-Service BI and impact on Licensing
• Overcoming challenges in data sharing and fostering a culture of cross-departmental collaboration.

Master Admin and Governance for Microsoft Fabric

Power BI Administrators have become Fabric Administrators from one day to another. Suddenly, there was Microsoft Fabric bringing a wealth of new features to the service, which have different requirements from an admin, governance and monitoring perspective. Now, we also incorporate data engineers, data scientists and many other roles into our ecosystem and internal community - there were we've worked with data analysts over the past years primarily.

In this table talk, four (5!) Microsoft Most Valuable professionals will discuss the admin and governance best practices combining your Power BI ecosystem with Microsoft Fabric platform solutions.

Topics that will be covered:
- Setting up domains in Fabric
- Workspace architecture
- Premium capacities versus Fabric capacities
- Capacity setup and monitoring
- New tenant configurations to consider and their impact
and much more! Your questions decide the direction of our discussion! Come and ask all your burning questions, whether you're an admin yourself or just curious the new world with Fabric and related controls.

PowerShell Hacks for Lazy Fabric/Power BI Admins

There's never a dull moment in the life of a Microsoft Fabric/Power BI Administrator. In order to protect our time and sanity, it's important to automate as many of our usual tasks and processes as possible. Additionally, since the top priority of the Power BI development team is the end user experience, there are many edge cases and "power user" type activities that cannot yet be accomplished using only Power BI Desktop and the Power BI web service. Fortunately, Microsoft has provided two priceless tools that allow us to automate and add missing functionality to Fabric and Power BI: The Fabric and Power BI REST APIs, and the MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt module for PowerShell. This presentation will demonstrate several techniques for harnessing these powerful tools to make your job as a Fabric/Power BI Administrator less time-consuming and more fun!

The Data Dojo: A Power BI Community of Practice

One of the best ways to improve data literacy and foster an active, passionate data culture within an organization is to establish a "Community of Practice" around the technologies the organization uses to process, store, analyze, and consume data.

In this session, we'll learn about "The Data Dojo: A Power BI Community of Practice," which was established at Des Moines University to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience among faculty and staff interested in analyzing the data generated by their teams and departments.

We'll also talk about the Data Dojo's egalitarian founding principles and unconventional structure, some of the topics we've covered at our workshops, what has gone right, what we could have done better, and what we're planning for the future.

And finally, we'll discuss how you can encourage data literacy and foster a vibrant data culture within your organization by establishing a Data Dojo of your own!

This is a non-technical session, focused almost exclusively on the human elements of fostering a healthy data culture within an organization.
Recommended time slot: 45-75 minutes, depending on whether a live Q&A session is included.

Automate Your Power BI and Fabric Backups with Fabric Archive Bot

Join James Bartlett for a session where he introduces Fabric Archive Bot, a free and open-source tool designed to automate backups of your Power BI and Fabric workspaces. This session will cover the key concepts behind Fabric Archive Bot, including REST APIs, JSON, and Service Principal Authentication. James will also demonstrate how to set up Fabric Archive Bot, run it manually, and schedule automatic backups using Windows Task Scheduler. By the end of this session, you'll have the knowledge to ensure that your Fabric items are securely backed up with minimal effort.

People who attend this session will:
- Understand the basics of how Fabric Archive Bot works, utilizing the Fabric REST APIs to enumerate and backup items from Fabric workspaces.
- See how using Service Principal Authentication (instead of User Principal Authentication) allows for 100% unattended automation of processes that would otherwise require a user to login.
- Learn how to set up and configure Fabric Archive Bot using the Azure Portal, PowerShell, and Windows Task Scheduler.

Prerequisites:
- Intermediate knowledge of the Fabric cloud service.
- Tenant administrator access to Fabric.
- Familiarity with Entra ID App Registrations (Service Principals) and Security Groups in the Azure Portal.
- A Windows machine with PowerShell version 7+ and Windows Task Scheduler.