Dashboards and business intelligence

Last week I took some time out of my schedule to experiment with Power BI. While Power BI can access many data sources, including a JSON/REST web service such as the ServiceAPI, it is simplest to access data sources for which a connector exists. This led me to experiment with Power Query custom connectors.

The connector I show in the video below is not production ready but is far enough along to demonstrate its viability. Before proceeding I would like some feedback from anyone who might use this to answer questions like:

  • Is Power BI of interest?

  • What data would you want to extract from CM in Power BI?

  • What sort of Dashboards / Reports would you produce?

One nice thing about a custom connector is that it could quite easily be backwards compatible, so would work with existing CM implementations.

If you have any interest in this space and want to see this experiment go further send me a private message at the CM Forum.

Written on April 8, 2019