Power BI Blog: Email Subscriptions

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series.  This week, we look at email subscriptions.

Just recently, the Power BI team announced the release of email subscriptions for scorecards.  Subscriptions enable you to receive email notifications and stay up to date on the scorecards that matter most to you and your team.

To set up a subscription, select the Subscribe button in the Ribbon:

Then, select ‘Add a new subscription’ in the pane that opens on the right side:

Enter the details about the subscription such as the name for the subscription, subject and email message details.  Then, set the frequency on how often you want to receive the emails such as hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.  Also, you may set a scheduled time for the subscription, such as on the hour, or at 15, 30 or 45 minutes past, AM or PM, and specify the time zone.  You may then select a ‘Start date’ and optionally an ‘End date’ for the subscription.  You can also include a link to the scorecard in the email and give recipients permission to view the scorecard.  Finally, select ‘Save and close’.  After saving, you can edit the subscription, turn it on and off or delete the subscription.

Recipients will receive an email from Power BI with a table containing the scorecard data such as metric name, status, values and due date.  The table will show up to 50 metrics, viz.

You can add up to 24 subscriptions per scorecard, with unique recipients, times and frequencies for each subscription.  You can see all the subscriptions by opening the Subscriptions pane from a scorecard in ‘My workspace’, and selecting ‘Manage all subscriptions’, or from under the Settings -> Subscriptions tab in the upper right corner of Power BI Service.

Note that you can subscribe to scorecards if you have a Pro license or PPU license or if scorecard is in a workspace backed by Premium capacity.  You can subscribe other team members if in addition to the above, you are a Contributor, Member or Administrator in that workspace.  If the scorecard isn’t hosted in a Premium capacity, others must also have a Pro license.  You can add other email addresses in the same domain to the subscription.  If the scorecard is hosted in a Premium capacity, you can subscribe group aliases, whether they’re in your domain or not.  You may subscribe external users if scorecard is hosted in a Premium capacity too.

In the meantime, please remember we offer training in Power BI which you can find out more about here.  If you wish to catch up on past articles, you can find all of our past Power BI blogs here.