Guide to Endorsing Fabric Items: Promoting and Certifying

What is Endorsement in Microsoft Fabric?

Endorsement is basically a way to highlight the best items in the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, making them easier to find and use by users within an organization. Endorsement ensures that reliable, high-quality data, processes, and content are easy to find within Microsoft Fabric.

Types of Endorsement in Microsoft Fabric

Succinctly, there are two types of endorsement in Microsoft Fabric - Promotion and Certification.

• Promotion: This is when users share items that they find useful, valuable, and ready to use. This helps spread good content within the organization and promotes collaborations.
• Certification: This is when a group of reviewers (chosen by the Fabric administrator) verify that an item meets the quality standards of the organization, making it trustworthy and authoritative. Certification means an item can be used across the organization.

How to Find Endorsed Items?

Endorsed items have a clear label both in Fabric and in other places where users look for Fabric items (such as Power BI semantic models in Excel).

They also rank higher in some searches, and users can filter for endorsed items in some lists.

Which Items Can Be Endorsed?

All Fabric items such as apps, lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, etc (except Power BI dashboards) can be endorsed by the admin or the Fabric Data Engineer. Items promoted or certified can be demoted and uncertified.

Practical Example of Promoting Warehouse Item

In this practical example, I have a Data Warehouse named WH in my A to Z Warehouse workspace.

To promote the WH warehouse item, hover the mouse in the open space and click on the ellipsis (three dots). This opens the options flyover as seen below.

Select Settings

In the WH Warehouse intermediate pane, select Endorsement from the tabs on the left and select Promoted.

Close the pane window

In the screenshot below, the promoted icon is visible for the WH item.

Certify Report Item

Certifying Fabric item toggle ID is not available in the endorsement tab by default, it requires the admin to enable item certification in the Fabric Admin Portal. Therefore, to enable certification either for the entire organization or a specific security group, at the top right-hand cover, click on Setting

In the Governance and Insights group, select Admin Portal.

In the Admin Portal, in the search box, type in cert.

In the Discovery settings, toggle the button to Enable and click Apply at the bottom. This might take up to 15 minutes for the Certify to be visible in the endorsement tab of the item to be certified.

Back to the A to Z of Warehouse workspace, I've got a Financial Power BI Report item to certify.

To certify the report item, locate the ellipsis and select settings.

Scroll down and there we go! The certify toggle button is available to be toggled on. Proceed to toggle it on as seen below.

Click Save.

In the screenshot below, the report item is Certified with the endorsement icon.

Conclusion

We've seen how to practically endorse items in Microsoft Fabric's all-in-one analytical solution using Promotion and Certification. We've also learned how to enable certification in the admin portal.