Microsoft Corp. on Thursday provided a sneak peak of some upcoming new features in its Power BI and Azure Cloud offerings, ahead of its Inspire partner conference that takes place in Las Vegas next week.

With its analytics service Power BI, Microsoft is adding new features designed to streamline and expand data preparation, while also making it easier to unify various data platforms.

In a blog post, Microsoft Engineering General Manager Arun Ulag noted that ingesting and preparing data is one of the most time-consuming aspects of data analytics. So the new Power Query update is all about reducing the time it takes for business analysts working with data to get insights, Ulag said.

“Using the Power Query experience familiar to millions of Power BI Desktop and Excel users, business analysts can ingest, transform, integrate and enrich big data directly in the Power BI web service — including data from a large and growing set of supported on-premises and cloud-based data sources, such as Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Excel and SharePoint,” Ulag wrote.

In addition, once the data has been ingested, users can then share it across various Power BI dashboards, models and reports, thereby making it easier to reuse that data.

Microsoft is also making some collaboration improvements. It’s now possible to use Power BI to analyze data stored in Azure Data Lake Storage and extend access to these insights to services such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks and Azure Machine Learning.

“For example, data engineers can add, enrich and orchestrate data; data scientists can build machine learning models; and business analysts can benefit from the work of others and the data available in the Azure Data Lake Storage while continuing to use the self-service tools in Power BI to build and share insights broadly,” Ulag said.

Elsewhere, Microsoft is offering a diet-sized version of its Azure Data Box data-transfer appliance, which rivals the Snowball appliance offered by its cloud rival Amazon Web Services Inc.

Like Snowball, Azure Data Box is an actual box that companies can use to ship data physically from their on-premises infrastructure to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Introduced last year at Microsoft’s Ignite conference, Azure Data Box is meant for companies that have data sets that are too large to be transferred to the cloud over the internet.

Now, Microsoft is introducing a smaller version of that box, called Azure Data Box Disk, which it said is being offered in response to its customers’ demands for a smaller, lower-capacity option.

“While our customers and partners love Data Box, they told us that they also wanted a lower-capacity, even easier-to-use option,” said Microsoft’s Azure Data Box Director Dean Paron in a blog post. “They cited examples such as moving data from Remote/Office Branch Offices (ROBOs), which have smaller data sets and minimal on-site tech support.”

Here’s a quick comparison of Azure Data Box Disk and the older Azure Data Box:

The Azure Data Box Disk is now available in preview in the U.S. and the E.U.

Finally, Microsoft said it will introduce two new networking features for Azure at next week’s Inspire conference. These include Azure Virtual WAN, which allows companies to use Azure’s own private network connections to connect their own geographically separated local networks. The company is also introducing the Azure Firewall service, which will help to protect those connections.

The announcements came on the same day the company launched a free tier of its workplace collaboration platform Microsoft Teams.

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