James Mounsey-Moran
Tech, Optimisation, PowerBI and Prism!
📋 Biography
I’m James Mounsey-Moran, these days best known for Prism, Power BI, and my role as a Product Manager. I’ve worked with Microsoft technology for pretty much my whole life, from building desktops and deploying servers to writing PowerShell and navigating the ever joyful world of licensing. Prism started as a Power BI project I built on the weekend alongside the community with the aim of helping others get real value from their Microsoft investment. What began as a personal solution grew into a product used around the world and literally shaped my career! Now I share lessons learned through my Aether project as well as solutions I’ve built, and things I've picked up back with the community. If you fancy chatting about Power BI, Prism, product management, or Microsoft in general, feel free to connect on LinkedIn or drop me an email always happy to talk.
✨ High-Impact Contributions 4
I published a PowerShell solution that prevents Power BI scheduled refreshes from being paused after 60 days of inactivity. The post walks through how to automatically keep datasets active by running DAX queries against each defined datasets within specific workspaces and then triggering report exports through the REST API. It’s designed for Power BI admins and builders or those using Power BI within products to ensure continued and available access.
Hosted the Prism stand at Trustmarque’s Fusion Live event, speaking with customers about how Prism and how Power BI, Microsoft 365, and Azure can be used together to deliver meaningful insight and drive value.
I wrote a blog and posted on LinkedIn showing how I update Power BI reports at scale using PowerShell. This script works with multiple workspaces and datasets, keeping parameters intact, temporarily disables scheduled refresh to avoid errors, and updates reports from a single PBIX file. I also added version control so deployments can be tracked and staged if required.
I published a blog to show users how to enhance Azure DevOps reporting in Power BI using less known API calls. The standard DevOps connector in Power BI only brings through a basic dataset, so I built a reusable power query function in Power BI that uses the DevOps API so it can pull in extra fields for use in product manager roles such as priority, description, and loads of extra information related to user stories. This tutorial helps users with setting up the function, using parameters for connecting to specific projects and ways to use the data to build better views of product and backlog reviews.