Viewer Role Authorities Changed

Users in the 'Viewer' role are now exposed to the semantic models.

Prior to this change, our users had a much cleaner and more intuitive experience. They were presented with the reports and dashboards that we intended for them to consume, without being exposed to the underlying Semantic Models. Now that the Semantic Models are visible, users are seeing additional objects that they do not understand, do not need to interact with, and in many cases may mistake for reports, datasets, or other content they are expected to use.

Organizations have very different Power BI governance models and user populations. A change that intentionally alters what users see within a workspace should, in our opinion, provide administrators with the ability to determine whether that behavior is appropriate for their environment. At a minimum, there should be a supported way to preserve the previous user experience for organizations that do not want to expose these additional objects.

Are any other organizations as frustrated by this change as we are??

It has been explained by support as an "enhancement intended to align the user experience with the documented behavior."

We believe the documentation should have been updated to reflect how the Viewer role is intended to work in practice — not the other way around.

There is no practical use case for Viewer-role users accessing semantic models. This change represents a meaningful degradation in user experience, and we strongly encourage the team to incorporate real-world usage patterns of Power BI Service into future decision-making before changes like this are implemented.