Episode 299 – Organizational Themes, Field Parameters Hit GA & Copilot Gets Smarter
Recording after John’s son’s wedding (complete with a beautiful blend of Western and Tamil traditions), Jason and John tackled the Power BI July 2025 feature summary—a release focused on organizational control, AI enhancements, and long-awaited general availability announcements.
M365 Data Sharing Expands Discoverability
The update leads with expanded data sharing between Fabric and Microsoft 365 services—a tenant-level setting that improves how copilot and search find Power BI content. The feature shares extended metadata including report titles, axis labels, and access control lists (but not actual data values).
“It’s not data because we are talking about Power BI itself,” John clarified. “You won’t be able to search on data value. You will be able to search on table name or visual names.”
Jason noted the security model properly respects Fabric permissions—users only see metadata for content they can access. The setting fires information similar to GitHub workspace synchronization but includes security context for M365 copilot reasoning.
The duo expects this will improve findability, a topic that came up repeatedly during their Seattle TechCon sessions. Jason plans to test whether it enhances his M365 copilot searches, though both remain curious about real-world impact.
SQL Server 2025 Consolidates Reporting
Power BI Report Server becomes the default on-premises reporting solution for all paid SQL Server 2025 editions, effectively retiring SQL Server Reporting Services. PBIRS has always been a superset of SSRS, making the consolidation logical.
Licensing details remain unclear—previously PBIRS required specific enterprise licensing, but the announcement states it’s now included with “all paid SQL Server editions.” Jason spotted an important caveat: “more information about specific editions with access to PBIRS when SQL Server 2025 is generally available.”
The pair questioned whether developer edition (which is free) might gain access, though the “paid editions” language suggests otherwise. John deadpanned: “That’s good news for the three people who were holding back on PBIRS because it was too expensive.”
Copilot Standalone Gets Report-First Search
The standalone copilot experience gained report-focused search rather than defaulting to semantic models. Previously, copilot returned models where it found data; now it prioritizes reports that may have filters, shaping, and specific contexts applied.
Users can also limit copilot search to AI-prepped content specifically—reports where authors completed the “prep for AI” workflow including verified answers and custom instructions. This creates another task for report authors but enables cleaner, more controlled copilot results.
Jason sees governance value: “If you’re properly managing your environment and saying this is a way of properly decorating and marking your content, I think there’s one that needs to go a step beyond—only include certified reports.” He wants endorsement-based filtering to handle scenarios where 35 people work on the same dataset with different iterations.
John suspects endorsed content and AI-prepped content may eventually align, though that’s “probably a little while away.”
Subscription Summaries & Custom Instructions
Subscriptions can now include AI-generated summaries in emails, potentially eliminating the need to open reports for quick updates. The feature honors custom instructions set by semantic model authors.
Jason builds many reports with copilot summary visuals as the first page—this extends that pattern into email delivery. He’s particularly curious whether custom instructions can be subscription-specific: “For this subscription which is for East US sales team, treat with a filter and summarize this in my summary, then send me the link.”
The narrative visual also works in subscriptions now (it didn’t before), and natural language data queries return summary text before visuals rather than just firing charts without context—though Jason thought this already existed.
All these features require paid Fabric capacity—they don’t work in trials or Pro workspaces.
Field Parameters Finally Reach GA
After three years in preview, field parameters hit general availability. The feature lets users parameterize visuals with fields, switching between dimensions without changing the underlying report.
“I have customers who love this feature, been begging for it to get to GA for years now, literally years now,” Jason noted. Organizations couldn’t use preview features often waited specifically for this announcement.
The GA release includes improvements: efforts to maintain matrix state when switching parameters (previously everything collapsed), though John noted “sometimes we just can’t” preserve state—an honest acknowledgment of technical limitations.
Organizational Themes Arrive
A new preview feature enables Power BI administrators to centrally manage custom JSON themes from the admin portal, ensuring consistent branding across all reports—including copilot-generated content.
Jason had extensive conversations with Mike Carlo from Power BI Tips about their tooling in this space. Previously, organizations distributed PBIX template files or relied on third-party tools for theme management. Now it’s built-in, with validation and centralized updates.
“This wasn’t a big deal in my previous world for internal reports,” Jason explained, “but anything you were showing to a customer, you wanted to make sure it had the right branding.” The feature particularly matters for copilot, which can now respect organizational themes rather than using its default styling.
John noted themes existed in Desktop for nearly 10 years but never in the service—new reports created online just got default styling. Now administrators upload approved themes and users select from the approved list.
Visual Calculations Gain Sorting
Visual calculations added optional order-by parameters, letting users specify sort sequences directly rather than building complex DAX in the model layer. “We’ve had to do this in desktop before and go in and do it in DAX,” Jason noted. “With visual calcs, it’s nice to be able to just specify and be done.”
PBIP/PBIR Approach GA
The biggest developer news: PBIP and PBIR formats removed all preview limitations and now work with deployment pipelines, save-as-copy operations, usage metrics, and complete REST API integration. The team officially states these formats are “on the path to general availability.”
John and Jason plan to check the Fabric roadmap for specific GA timing, though searchability challenges make hunting through categories difficult. The feature could logically sit under Power BI, Security & Governance, or Fabric Developer Experiences.
For organizations blocked by preview status, this announcement signals imminent production-readiness for the Git-friendly project format.
Other Updates
Additional noteworthy changes included:
- Power BI app in Teams gained full navigation matching the web interface (though both hosts question the screen real estate tradeoff)
- Direct Lake mode now accesses mirrored and Fabric SQL databases
- DAX query view and web modeling added a view switcher at the bottom of the screen (avoiding ribbon clutter)
- Mobile app home reorganized to combine recent/frequent and surface favorites prominently
- Pie and donut charts gained extensive slice styling options (prompting Jason’s pizza analogy about keeping slices under eight)
Conference Season Continues
With TechCon 365 Atlanta approaching in three weeks, John and Jason prepare to deliver their full-day Fabric tutorial plus several sessions and a round table. Jason particularly enjoyed the Seattle round table format where attendees shared business problems and solutions across company sizes—small helping big and vice versa.
The duo continues refining their conference portfolio, with additional stops planned for Branson in September and Dublin’s European SharePoint Conference in December.
July delivered focused improvements: organizational control through themes, long-awaited GA announcements, and continued copilot refinement. As John summarized before diving into the Fabric summary: “Not a ton here, but there’s a decent amount and there’s a couple things that are exciting.”
Links:
- Power BI July 2025 Feature Summary
- Fabric Roadmap
- Power BI Tips
- Episode 295 – Power BI May 2025: Copilot Takes Center Stage & Transactional Task Flows Arrive
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