Case Studies

Case Study: Microsoft Power BI Custom Visuals

Client

Microsoft-one of the biggest computer software and consumer electronics company in the world.

Business Need

Microsoft Corporation introduced Power BI as a complex solution for business analytics with interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities. Many big companies, such as Adobe and Intel, started using Power BI by migrating the existing solutions to Power BI reports and dashboards, but Power BI visualization set is limited to basic charts only such as Table, Column Chart, Line Chart, etc. To extend visualization set and make transition from other solutions simpler Microsoft introduced Power BI Custom Visuals API for developing visualizations with rich capabilities that can meet any requirements.

 

Solution

To solve the business need Akvelon, in collaboration with Microsoft, defined initial requirements for custom visuals that will help companies to adopt Power BI and migrate from other solutions. Akvelon had to develop custom visuals and deliver a custom visual each week.

In addition to developing custom visuals for Power BI Akvelon took additional approach to support third party companies with developing custom visuals by working with partners together to help their businesses.

Benefits and Results

Akvelon team went through initial requirements and developed lots of components for Power BI such as Power KPI, Dual KPI, Power KPI Matrix, Word Cloud, etc. These components are very popular in the marketplace and they are even in use by Microsoft Senior Leadership Team that includes James and Satya.

Akvelon team also developed E2E tests that we run everyday to make sure no breaking changes come to production. We

also own publication infrastructure that publish custom visuals into Azure CDNs.

Our current focus is to:

  • Extend the existing custom visuals
  • Help third party developers and companies in developing new custom visuals
  • Support community forum for developers
  • Certify and review custom visuals
  • Develop an advanced version of PBIVIZ tools with modern JavaScript support
  • Mitigate customers incidents
  • Test custom visuals End-to-End automatically

Technology Used

Azure DevOps, GitHub, TypeScript, LESS, D3.js, Jasmine, Karma, Puppeteer, Node.js