Publish reports (preview)

The Publish reports feature lets you share insights and reports directly with leaders, decision-makers, or even an entire organization in the recipient’s Viva Insights app. This helps to streamline the communication process between analysts and leadership, ensuring that organizational insights and data are delivered effectively alongside other Viva Insights content.

A "report" can refer to:

• Any Power BI report within Viva Insights. This could be a precomputed report on the home page, or a Power BI report that you access from the Query results tab.

• A custom report stored outside of Viva Insights that includes Viva Insights metrics or other types of metrics like surveys or Microsoft 365 Copilot metrics. This report is typically in Power BI but it doesn't have to be. You might have already shared this report via email, but with this feature you can publish it seamlessly within Viva Insights.

Here's a few more details about how it works:

• With this feature, you publish your report as a prominently displayed card on the recipient’s Viva Insights home page.

• We'll help you create the card, which includes a title, description, and a link to your report.

• You select the card's recipients, and specify how long you want it to be published.

• After publishing, cards always appear at the top of recipient's home page, and you can track the impact using their unique card IDs.

Prerequisite

This feature is off by default. To enable this feature in your tenant, Insights admins must first agree to the Microsoft Viva Preview Agreement terms. To do so, use this page to agree to these terms and enable this feature in your tenant.

Roles and permissions

You can access this feature within the advanced insights app.

• Analysts can create new publishes, view publishes, and remove any existing publishes.

• Insights admins can view publishes and set which analysts can publish using Viva Feature Access Management (VFAM).

Publish reports landing page

This page displays all the publishes within the past year from the partition, regardless of their state. From this page, you can manage your previous publishes, and publish a new report.

When viewing existing publishes, you can see details on the author, publish name, publish date, end date, status, and actions.

How to publish a Viva Insights Power BI report

Any Power BI report within Viva Insights can be sent to eligible recipients. Those recipients receive the report and can view it just like you do.

While you're viewing the report that you want to publish, select Report actions and then Publish new report.

Create your card

The card you create is what recipients see on their Viva Insights app home page. Fill out the details for this card and ensure it looks accurate using the card preview before publishing. You're responsible for the content that appears on your published cards.

• Report: This is pre-filled with the report name of the report you're publishing.

• Card title: Choose a concise and descriptive title for your report. This can't be empty and must be fewer than 100 characters.

• Publisher name: Keep your name or update it to reflect the group publishing the report. This can't be empty and must be fewer than 100 characters.

• Description: Write a summary of the report's content and its relevance to the target audience. This can't be empty and must be fewer than 500 characters.

Ensure the content looks accurate by reviewing the preview on the right side of the page.

Example scenario

Let's say you've set up the Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption analysis. In the query's results, you viewed the Power BI report, and now you want to share it with others in your organization. Since the report is embedded, the recipient can't access any row-level data. You can create the card like the one below to show that the publish is coming from you. You can use the preview to see how this card looks when it's published to your recipients.

Select target audience

You can use the feature's targeting options to publish to senior leaders in your organization. Senior leaders are designated based on their role and organization structure, typically including executives and managers with a minimum number of reports. They can see insights about the entire organization. Learn more about how senior leaders are assigned.

Choose how long the card should be active

Set a date when the published report card will no longer be available for recipients to view. You can select a date up to 90 days out.

Choose a name for the publish

Assign a unique name to your report's publish. This name will help you and other analysts identify the report within the Advanced Insights app. This is only visible within the Advanced Insights app and is not visible to recipients.

Publish

Once you've filled out the details, select Publish to publish your report.

Upon publishing, the card is available immediately on recipients' Viva Insights app home page. A Teams notification is sent to recipients during their working hours displaying the card, if the recipient hasn't already seen the card. Recipients can only receive up to one Teams notification a day, so keep that in mind if you publish multiple reports in a single day. If recipients haven't accessed the card after about 24 hours, they'll receive a reminder notification.

How to publish a custom report

Under the Analysis tab in the advanced insights app, select Publish reports. Then, at the top right, select Publish new.

Create your card

The card you create is what recipients see on their Viva Insights app home page. Fill out the details for this card and ensure it looks accurate using the card preview before publishing. You're responsible for the content that appears on your published cards.

• Report Link: Provide the URL where the report can be accessed.

  Important

  This feature does not provide recipients permissions to the URL you’re publishing. Ensure that you have already made this URL available to your recipient audience so there aren’t permissions issues when recipients access this link from the card.

  • If you're publishing a Power BI report, ensure that you have already shared it with your desired audience so they can access the content once you publish. Learn more about sharing Power BI reports.

    Important

    This feature does not filter or edit the data based on viewer, so whatever you publish is published as-is to all recipients.

  • If you're publishing a Power BI report, consider adding row-level security to it if you want viewers to only see a subset of the data that is applicable to them.

• Card Title: Choose a concise and descriptive title for your report. This can’t be empty and must be fewer than 100 characters.

• Publisher Name: Keep your name or update it to reflect the entity publishing the report. This can’t be empty and must be fewer than 100 characters.

• Description: Write a summary of the report's content and its relevance to the target audience. This can’t be empty and must be fewer than 500 characters.

Ensure the content looks accurate by reviewing the preview on the right side of the page.

Example scenario

Let's say you want to publish your Hybrid workplace dashboard. This dashboard is saved to your Power BI workspace and has already been shared with your desired audience. It doesn't have row-level security implemented, so recipients see all the data in the report. You can create your card like the one below and publish it under your team name, HR Analytics, rather than using your own name as publisher. You can see how this card looks when it’s published to your recipients with the Preview.

Select target audience

You can use the feature's targeting options to publish to specific users or to an audience based on organizational attributes.

• Publish to specific people: Select people to publish to directly. These people can be inside or outside your partition.

• Publish to an audience based on organizational attributes: Define a population based on Required and Reserved attributes to receive your published content. You must add at least one condition to publish. These people can only be from within your partition.

Choose how long the card should be active

Set a date when the published report card will no longer be available for recipients to view. You can select a date up to 90 days out.

Choose a name for the publish

Assign a unique name to your report's publish. This name will help you and other analysts identify the report within the Advanced Insights app. This is only visible within the Advanced Insights app and is not visible to recipients.

Continuing our example

Let’s say you want to publish your Hybrid workplace dashboard to your Engineering function. You can publish to that audience based on your available organizational attributes. You can then select this card to be published for 90 days and provide a publish name you can use to find this publish later on the Publish reports landing page.

Publish

Once you’ve filled out the details, select Publish to publish your report.

Upon publishing, the card is available immediately on recipients' Viva Insights app home page. A Teams notification is sent to recipients during their working hours displaying the card, if the recipient hasn't already seen the card. Recipients can only receive up to one Teams notification a day, so keep that in mind if you publish multiple reports in a single day. If recipients haven't accessed the card after some time, they'll receive a reminder notification.

Finishing our example

The published card appears for recipients to view. When the recipient selects Open, they'll be taken to the URL you provided.

Manage your published report

Once you publish a report, it’s available for all recipients to view. If you decide the details of a published report are incorrect, you can remove the publish via the Publish reports page and create a new publish. You can’t edit a published report.

Track engagement

You can learn how recipients are engaging with your published report card by using the Custom Recommendations query. This is like Person and Meeting queries, but it only provides engagement data on the reports you’ve published.

Navigate to Create analysis and select the Custom query filter on the top. From there, find the Custom Recommendations card and select Set up analysis.

In the metrics section, add relevant metrics from the Custom recommendation activity metrics dropdown. Then, run the query.

When the query completes, download the results from Query results. You can then map the Card ID from the View publish page within Publish Reports to the Card identity column in the report output to find the engagement of your published report card.

Administrative capabilities

VFAM

Insights admins can manage which analysts are enabled to publish reports by creating Viva Feature Access Management policies. By default, there are no policies set, so all analysts can publish reports and manage them.

To change this default, Insights admins can create new policies to allow them to manage this feature. Use these steps to manage access policies. The FeatureId is AnalystReportPublish and the corresponding ModuleID is VivaInsights in VFAM.

Examples of policies might look like:

• Enable publishing for all analysts (default)

• Enable publishing for all analysts, except for specific ones

• Disable publishing for all analysts, except for specific ones

• Disable publishing for all analysts

Learn more about VFAM policies.

Unified audit log

Publishing related actions are captured in the Unified Audit Log.