Opinions needed: Collaboration in Power BI Online

[Borntoreport]

Hallo community,

in my company we have for each department its own work space in Power BI online (Sales, Finance, Inventory, Purchase etc.). All of our report creation happens in Power BI Desktop (need of building data models, calculated measures etc.) and after publishing to Power BI online we build the dashboards. For each department is one report and dasboard-designer responsible.

The main reasons for work spaces is to collaborate together. Since our report building happens in Power BI Desktop and our users are mainly consumer does it make sense to have group workspaces? In the work space finance are e.g. the dashboards income statement, balance sheet and budget planing and 8 connected reports. Couldnt we also just share the dashboards to the different users instead of building a work space?

Since our user in Power BI online are consumer, do you allow users to edit reports online? What about the risk of having different versions of the report and "losing" the original one?

Looking forward to hear your opinions and to get insights in how you collaborate in Power BI!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@Borntoreport I typically recommend the following:

Use Group Workspaces for report authors. These workspaces are important because you don't want reports tied to a single users (My Workspace). If that person leaves or no longer has the report responsibilities you would have to move everything via API's. Group Workspaces allow for multiple users to have access to, modify and make updates to shared reports. - Keep using them

In terms of sharing. It sounds like you could simplify the end user experiance by removing the end users from the workspace and just sharing the dashboards with them in the way you describe. This is really straightforward for the end user, and they can search all content within that "Shared with Me" section.

As for the Desktop files, I'm a fan of always starting there (as you describe). This ensures that if a report is inadvertantly deleted in the Service I can just republish it. The files themselves can be stored in the "File" section of the workspace. With each Group Workspace a SharePoint file folder is created and you can save all your PBIX files there so that everyone with access can just go to that shared folder to update any existing report in the Service.

Hope that helps.

[ame54]

Wonder if you can help me understand the collaboration life cycle a bit more, coz I feel i still don't fully grasp it.

I have some experience with QlikSense on a enterprise level and there:

1- Reports are shared and placed in streams which you can say match to Workspace, and the users in the stream can either view or edit the applications there.

The editing part, what happens is each user gets a copy of the application and does his modifications there. When he is ready to publish it, it will be moved to a community container and the original application is unchanged. Only the global admin can really change the main application published to users.

2- Also, in Qliksense QMC (the management portal) you can view all applications and who has created them, and manage them from there.

Is something like this possible with current feature list of Power BI ?

[Borntoreport]

Hey @Anonymous, thank you for your advice! Your answer helped me a lot.

[Anonymous]

@Borntoreport Awesome! Happy to help.