Sync with SharePoint - Team Sites

[GarryPope]

Hello Power BI Community,

I hope you can help, please.

I'm exploring versioning and backups for Power BI files. One suggestion is to sync Power BI Service with a SharePoint folder. That way I can utilise the versioning and restoring functionality in SharePoint. Great! 

But one issue I see with this is every time I save the PBIX file, such as I made some changes to a report and want to save as I go along, because it syncs to the Power BI Service, those changes appear within one hour in the Power BI Service. So this approach doesn't seem to be useful if you're saving your changes as you go, as the "Save" button does the same as the "Publish" button.

What I'm hoping is that somehow I can save the changes to the file as I go along, and then "commit" all the changes when I'm ready. The publish button does not work in this scenario, I believe it creates a second report. Of course, I could use Dev, Test, Prod Workspaces, but really I'm just interested in this scenario at the moment.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much.

[GarryPope]

Thanks @lbendlin.

I like the concept of the App. I'm using that in other Workspaces.

The sync with SharePoint, to me anyway, doesn't seem like a great idea due to the limitation I mentioned in my original question. We wanted to ask our users to do this as a best practice, but actually I'll just ask them not to sync it with SharePoint, but still store the PBIX file in a SharePoint folder so that they can use the version and restore functionality... and simply click Save as they make edits and Publish when they want to commit them. People are used to that process anyway.

Thanks for all your help,

Garry  

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

You would need a Premium workspace and the concept of an app (and only sharing the app) to accomplish this pseudo staging setup.  However we have found that oftentimes meta data changes in the PBIX are severe enough to cause disruption in the app unless we also republish/update the app. 

One other way to test would be to have a shadow PBIX that has the new functionality but is only shared with test users. Once they are happy the shadow PBIX can be "saved as"  the "production" PBIX.