Best practice to allow users to create their own reports

[TCavins]

Our current set up is to create custom workspaces that only IT has access to. Workspaces published to Apps and those are shared with specific teams and individuals. We created custom workspaces to allow IT to have access to their data/reports without giving us access to their Office 365 Team sites.

We want to look into allowing some users to create their own reports but we would supply the data. What is the recommended approach? IT should control the data and we would like any updates we make to the dataset to automatically be available to those we've given access to create their own reports and it would affect any reports they've already created. Basically, we want one single source of truth.

Our users do not have access to the workspaces that publish to the apps they currently have access to. I'd prefer to keep it that way as I don't want them to have edit access to other datasets/reports in the same workspace.

[nickyvv]

Hi @TCavins,

those are great questions, I'll try and see if I can answer them.

You'll definitely want to have a look at the Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment, located at the whitepapers section of Power BI.

Especially the section about Centralized Datasets for Corporate Reporting on page 23.

There they talk about a disconnected dataset from the reports.

That means you publish your datamodel to workspace A, and users create reports from that dataset in the service, in Power BI Desktop with a live connection to that dataset. They would need to have Build permissions on the dataset to do so. So they don't need access to workspace A. The users can then publish their reports to workspaces B/C for example.

If you look at the picture on page 24:

Your current setup are the View-only users who have access to the App.

You want to have the Report designer to create the Report in Power BI Desktop on the Dataset from the Data modeler (IT in your case).

If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out.

[User1990]

@nickyvv - is it possible to have External "Report designers", meaning they are not employees / O365 users internal to the organization hosting the dataset?  Or organization currently has an externally facing multi-tenant environment, whereby our users would like to create their own dynamic / custom reports.  We as internal admins would like to create our own standard or canned dashboards/reports, while allowing our external clients the ability to create their own as well.