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Fugo provides two ways to display your Power BI data on screen:

Native Power BI app

This method uses the Power BI API to securely connect to your Microsoft account and directly load your dashboard or report onto your screen or player. It's the easiest and recommended way to display your Power BI data using Fugo.

See how it works here.

TV Dashboards feature

This method doesn't rely on the Power BI API. Instead, it simulates your login process (via a Chrome extension) and takes a screenshot of your dashboard. The screenshot is then sent to your screen and automatically refreshed at a set interval.

Some dashboards require more computational power and storage to stay active, which might be too much for the browser on your screen or player to handle. This can result in dashboards not loading fully or failing to load altogether.

Some dashboards contain up to millions of rows of data that need to be processed (e.g., grouped, summed) before they are displayed. This can result in long loading times, especially when the dashboard is set to display for a short duration. For example, if a dashboard takes 100 seconds to load but is only displayed for 10 seconds, you would mostly see loading screens, which defeats the purpose of displaying your dashboard.

In cases like these, the screenshot method is more efficient, as it avoids these delays and provides a more consistent display experience.

Power BI is only supported on the two most recent versions of Chrome. If your screen or player uses an older browser, Power BI won't work for you.

The screenshot method solves this issue by rendering the dashboard in a Cloud server, bypassing the need for your device to handle it directly.

The easiest and recommended way to connect your screens to Power Bi is to use Fugo's native Power BI integration, which loads your Power BI dashboards & reports into Fugo. Simply log in to your account, then have all of your workspace's data available in Fugo to configure within your display.

Check out our full guide for that 👉 here.

MS Power BI is one of many powerful business intelligence tools that integrate with Fugo’s TV Dashboards feature. This allows your Power BI dashboards and reports to be shown on office TV screens without having to create a public URL or decrypt encrypted credentials on your media player or screen device.

With Fugo handling all encryption in the Cloud, you no longer need to risk your data being lifted from a plug-in device (or that device being walked off with), or network traffic being intercepted. It’s truly one of the most secure ways to show any data on any digital signage screen.

Let's dig into how to do that.

We’ll get to the walkthrough in just a second - but first, let’s go over a couple of best practices that we recommend following whenever you’re connecting any third-party dashboard service with your Fugo CMS account:

1. Create a service account

To ensure the utmost security for your sensitive data, we recommend setting up a 'least privileged' service account in your dashboard account. This typically means using an account with read-only permissions for the dashboards you want to display.

Using a service account not only enhances security but also prevents potential interruptions in your account like unexpected logouts or excessive security notifications. Additionally, full-access user accounts often come with associated phone numbers, which gets in the way of Fugo's authorization process.

You can read more about how to set up a service account with Google here.

2. Have your dashboard or report URL(s) handy

Because Fugo is going to record & repeat the steps you take to access your dashboard, we want to eliminate any unnecessary steps in the process that will slow Fugo down when accessing your dashboard, such as starting from the homepage of your platform and navigating to your chosen dashboard.

You'll need the URL of your specific dashboard/report that you want to display on screen ready when you start the process of capturing it with Fugo. Copy that URL and have it ready to paste into Fugo's Dashboards Step Recorder.

If your organization uses SSO or 2FA to log in to your required dashboard, then you'll require a Secret Key from your login service to input during your dashboard configuration.

This Secret Key is an alphanumeric code that essentially allows Fugo to act as a trusted user to access your dashboard.

You'll either get the Secret Key from your SSO provider, or you'll get it directly from your account in Salesforce, Power BI, etc...

Below are the currently supported SSO providers with links to our instructions for getting the Secret Key from them:

There are various other 2FA or SSO providers your organization may be using. We welcome you to try them with Fugo - at a baseline, your provider needs to have the option to set up a Time-based One Time Password (TOTP) in order to get your Secret Key.

If your organization needs additional support for an SSO provider, contact us using the info below in the "Help" section. Let us know which dashboard tool and SSO provider you want to use.

1. Log into your Fugo Account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.

2. Click Dashboards in the top navigation bar to go to your Dashboard library. If you have not created any dashboards yet, this page will be empty.

Click Create Dashboard to get started.

3. This will launch a New Dashboard window.

4. First, you’ll need to enter the URL of your dashboard tool in the URL field and click Open Dashboard.

5. If you're creating a TV Dashboard for the first time, you'll be prompted to configure your Chrome browser to allow our recorder extension to run in incognito mode.

If you’ve done this before, you can skip to step 12.

6. First, you'll need to install the Fugo Dashboard Recorder Chrome Extension.

7. This will open the Chrome Web Store in a separate tab. Click Add to Chrome to install the extension.

8. Go back to your tab with Fugo CMS. You will see a little blue checkmark on this step once you complete it.

9. Now you'll need to enable the extension to run in Incognito mode. Click Enable Allow In Incognito.

10. This will open the Extensions manager. Toggle on the Allow in Incognito option.

11. Back in your tab with Fugo CMS, you'll see both blue checkmarks now completed. Click Continue.

12. A pop-up window with our recorder will appear and prompt you to log into your dashboard. Enter your login credentials or sign in as you normally would.

13. Once you’re signed in, your dashboard will load in the recorder window. It's at this point that you'll instruct Fugo how to take the screenshot of your data.

You have three options:

14. The recorder will now close & take you back to the Dashboard page.

It's at this point that you'll need to enter the Secret Key (discussed in the previous 2FA section) into Fugo.

Depending on your login method, you'll either be prompted to input the secret key into a pop up window:

Or, you'll see the red prompt Enter secret key under the Pass 2-Factor Authorization step in the Recorded Steps panel.

Click this and enter the secret key that you generated from your login provider.

15. You’ll now see a “loading” screen while Fugo runs through your steps (logged in the right-hand panel) and captures a screenshot of your dashboard.

It can take some time depending on how many steps were involved - so don’t sweat it if it takes a minute or two!

16. Voila! Your dashboard should be rendered in the preview area.

17. If it all looks good, you can go ahead and publish it, or save it for later using the Publish or Save buttons in the bottom right corner.

You can publish it directly by choosing a screen, screen group, channel, or playlist to publish to.

Check out our collection on Playlists to learn more about how publishing works.

If you're not happy with how the dashboard rendered, discover how you can customize the look of your dashboard with Fugo's design tools or troubleshoot some common issues.

In case you're optimizing a dashboard specifically for TV display, it's important to keep in mind that TV dashboards don't function exactly the same way 'regular' desktop dashboards do. Audiences will be viewing them from farther away and looking for quick insights rather than in-depth analysis, which will necessitate some design considerations.

Here are some our tips for optimizing your Power BI TV dashboards:

You can find this brilliant overview by Power BI themselves on creating effective reports.

If you have any additional questions or feedback on using the Dashboards feature, please feel free to reach out to our support team at support@fugo.ai. We’re always happy and quick to help!

Happy publishing!