Have Your Power BI-driven Data Dashboards Stopped Working On Networked Screens? If So, Here’s The Likely Reason
July 15, 2024 by Dave Haynes
Signagelive CEO Jason Cremins has an interesting post up on Linkedin making the industry aware of a problem some digital signage networks may now be having: displaying real-time data dashboards powered by Microsoft’s Power BI.
Microsoft has raised minimum browser support requirements to properly show a URL tied to a Power BI dashboard visualization, so if the hardware being used for playing out digital signage does not meet the required level of browser support, it very likely won’t show the dashboard. This might particularly be the case with devices like system on chip commercial smart displays.
I saw a separate Linkedin post, unrelated to digital signage applications, saying more generally that those accessing Power BI on a web browser version older than Chrome 94, Edge 94, Safari 16.4, Firefox 93, or equivalent, should upgrade web browsers before the end of August.
The issue, as I kinda sorta somewhat understand it, is probably going to be with the play-back hardware, not the CMS. A CMS software company’s development team may well be keeping pace with browser revisions for its own web player, and would not directly be challenged by these shifting requirements, but the playback hardware may not be set up to support older browser versions, and the hardware dev team that manages the firmware may not also be keeping pace with browser revisions and advances. At that point, the software companies may be somewhat at the mercy, so to speak, of a manufacturer’s firmware roadmap.
Cremins is a cagey marketer, and he quite naturally sees an opportunity here, pointing out that his developer team thought this might happen and developed a workaround long ago. I know he walked me through this, maybe a couple of years ago, but can’t find the post I THOUGHT I did about it. Whatever the case, that workaround is proving handy as the Signagelive platform is unaffected, sine displaying Power BI dashboards is not tied to a web URL, which is the method used by many or most companies to incorporate Power BI dashboards into their playlists.
Instead of linking to a web URL for a specific Power BI dashboard, Signagelive instead developed a process that grabs screenshots of the dashboard in the cloud, instead of relying on device browsers.
The trade-off is that this is defined functionality with a cost, and not just support for showing a URL from a specific platform. “While our secure dashboard service may cost more, it shields your mission-critical applications from unexpected and costly tech disruptions,” Cremins explains.
I used a 404 error screen capture to illustrate this. That may not be what shows, but gets the idea across.
This explainer video gets into the issue and the Signagelive workaround. I don’t know if there are other software companies with their own and different approach, but happy to be informed!
Thanks for the coverage, Dave.
If you are relying on showing web pages from any BI platform or software application on your digital signage device/display, you always run the risk of the BI/software app making a change that the hardware device cannot display.
This is not so much of a problem for CMSs selling their own digital signage devices or using Windows/Linux/ChromeOS, as these devices are either up to date or can be updated. Still a risk to the operational stability of the digital signage network, but it can be done.
The challenge comes when you run those web pages on an SoC Manufacturer’s display, as they will not undermine their OS’s stability by updating the browser and that assumes they can.
Great topic, Dave!
Continuing to meet the market and customer needs for dashboard displays requires digital signage solutions to continuously adapt and provide an infrastructure to meet these demands.
I shared my thoughts on the subject in response to your post and what we’re doing at Skykit to meet these challenges.
https://www.skykit.com/blog/browser-updates-on-digital-signage-dashboards/
I would love to hear your thoughts and welcome a conversation.
Great to see this written about on a bigger platform! At Fugo, we addressed this problem by implementing a screenshotting feature in our Power BI app. Rather than relying on device browsers, we load the dashboard in a secure Cloud server and send a screenshot to the screen. We saw this affect a lot of our users, and so far it’s been a pretty reliable workaround – https://www.fugo.ai/blog/a-smart-fix-for-power-bi-dashboard-loading-issues-fugos-screenshotting-feature-2/