Forum Discussion
Self Service BI in APP or Workspace
Dear Community
We are looking into ways to implement PowerBI in our organisation.
For plain distribution of reports PowerBI does a great jojb and we have fun creating the reports and sharing them with a broad audience of users in a premium Capacity.
However, we want to enable Self Service BI. We come from a System that had a Pentaho Client running on top, which gave users access to cubes to generate and save their own reports. They would be refreshed according to a schedule. We want to keep that possibility.
I have found two ways of doing so:
Create a dedicated APP Workspace for Self Service BI and add the premium users to it as Admins.
Members do not see Datasets, hence they cannot do an analysis in the service.
Drawback: Everyone is an admin in that workspace, essentially able to do anything except for publishing/updatingan APP.
Let Users install PowerBI Desktop and connect to the PowerBI Service.
Works well and offers all capabilities of PowerBI
Drawback: It requires a native installation (which is a potential problem for us since we use ThinClients in some offices).
Is there a way to publish Datasets to an APP and enable analysis on them?
Is there a way to enable Dataset Anaylsis in an APP Workspace without making Users Admins?
Maybe there are other ways to solve this problem?
Thanks a lot for your help
Best regards
airfreighter
7 Replies
Anonymous The Premium license is an Add-on to the Pro license. You still need a Pro license for users who need to share content with others. From my understanding you shouldn't be able to add a Free user to an App Workspace... If you can, they shouldn't be able to access it from a licensing perspective. To answer your questions specifically:
Is there a way to publish Datasets to an APP and enable analysis on them? Currently Apps are read only.
Is there a way to enable Dataset Anaylsis in an APP Workspace without making Users Admins? This shouldn't work for users who don't have a Pro license.Maybe there are other ways to solve this problem? With licensing for App Workspace.
Depending on datasources, you could push to a supported datasource connection in the Service -Azure SQL DB or Warehouse.
Alternatively, you could deploy your dataset to a OneDrive or SharePoint Team site and have them pull the dataset from there. But in both these cases building visuals is all they could do.
True self service BI will require the Desktop as it is required to do anything in the model/add calculations/etc.
You could create a Power BI Template with the connection to the datasource. Each user would need permissions to access it, but then they could publish that dataset to their personal workspace and build reports
Those are the only options I can think of atm.
Hi Anonymous
Thanks a lot for your extensive reply.
In essence, free users that are using a premium capacity through APPS won't have access to the APP Workspace, unless they are in possesion of a Pro License. Am I getting this right?
Maybe there are other ways to solve this problem? With licensing for App Workspace.
What do you mean by that exactly? Giving users the Pro License?
Building visuals (and exporting raw data) would be the only thing we want to enable, True Self Service BI is something we want to administer thorugh Super Users in due time.
Keen on learning more on this and thanks a lot in advance!
Anonymous
In essence, free users that are using a premium capacity through APPS won't have access to the APP Workspace, unless they are in possesion of a Pro License. Am I getting this right? - Correct
"Maybe there are other ways to solve this problem? With licensing for App Workspace."
What do you mean by that exactly? Giving users the Pro License? - Yes, just re-iterating the above statement I madein the original post.
The overall issue revolves around sharing. Converting the "free user" to someone who needs app workspace permission or the ability to share content requires a Pro license. My recommendations in the original post sort of dive into other ways those free users could access a datasource to build their own reports, but they can't share those without a Pro. Premium is great for users who need only "read" access, the minute a user needs more it typically falls into the need for the Pro license.
End users could use the Natural Language Q&A feature to visualize the data in different ways from the dashboard, but, again, not exactly what your looking for.