Workspaces and applications

1. Workspaces and applications

Welcome to Deploying and Maintaining Assets in Power BI! My name is Kevin Feasel and I am going to guide you through the process of deploying content in Power BI.

2. Workspaces

Workspaces are the core of the Power BI Online experience. This is a place in which we can create and share collections of dashboards, reports, datasets, and paginated reports. This is also the primary method to collaborate with colleagues, allowing multiple people to work on datasets and reports concurrently. Within Power BI Online, you will have a "My workspace" section, which is a personal sandbox, letting you work on reports still in progress or deploy reports for your own use.

3. Workspace licensing

When it comes to licensing, let's break users down into two groups. First, we have collaborators. These are report creators, Power BI administrators, and frequent users of the service. By contrast, stakeholders only occasionally view reports and never create them. They only need basic report viewing functionality. In order to create or deploy content into workspaces, each collaborator needs a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User license. These licenses are priced per user in an organization, $10 per user per month for Pro and $20 per user per month for Premium Per User. Our stakeholders might have Pro or Premium Per User licenses. But no license is required to view content if we are running in Power BI Premium capacity. This is licensed at the organization level, not the user level, and starts at $5000 per month.

4. Workspace contacts

In order to provide the best experience for report users, you will want to let them know whom to contact for new data requests or troubleshooting content issues. This is where the contact list comes into play. By default, workspace admins are the contacts for a given workspace. You may also assign certain Power BI users or groups to be contacts for that workspace.

5. Workspace roles

There are four workspace roles in Power BI. The first is Admin, a person who can do anything in the workspace. Members may do anything save for adding new admins, updating the workspace, or deleting the workspace. Save this role for people who need to manage Power BI apps and workspace membership. Contributors design and deploy reports and datasets into a workspace but are not responsible for creating Power BI apps. Finally, Viewers may interact with dashboards and reports but cannot make changes.

6. Power BI apps

Apps are a way of packing content for broad distribution. We can package together any combination of dashboards, spreadsheets, datasets, and reports into one place for our users. This allows us to bundle reports together, making it easy for people to distribute and access our work across the organization and beyond. If we have five related reports covering several datasets, we can distribute them all as a single app, making it easy for users to get everything they need.

7. Types of Power BI apps

There are two types of Power BI app: organizational apps and template apps. Organizational apps are available to people inside your organization, whereas template apps may be deployed to external organizations as well. You can invite external users into your organization to view organizational apps but they cannot deploy them into their own Power BI tenants. Organizational apps are intended to provide a complete view, including data, reports, dashboards, and spreadsheets. Template apps, by contrast, typically let users inject their own data into pre-created reports and dashboards. For example, you might import a Dynamics 365 template app to review your own sales data. Users can also find template apps on Microsoft AppSource, the commercial marketplace for partners to integrate with Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Power BI. In the Power BI marketplace, hundreds of template apps are available to integrate with common platforms like SalesForce, GitHub, and Google Analytics.

8. App licensing

App licensing is fairly straightforward. If you are not running on Premium capacity, all users will need Pro or Premium Per User licenses to interact with the app. If you are using Premium capacity, you may provide some limited view access to users on the free tier.

9. Let's practice!

We've looked at a lot regarding Power BI workspaces and apps. Let's apply that knowledge to the following exercises.

Create Your Free Account

By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.