Sharing Best Practices

[Trudgeon]

Hello,

We are currently implementing Power BI, soon to be rolled out to our users, and I have some questions in regards to sharing best practices.  Basically, what is the best way to structure datasets and workspaces on PowerBI.com?

What we’re hoping to accomplish is to give users access to datasets in order to self-serve.  A shared workspace seems like logical solution, but we don’t to muck up shared workspaces with everyone’s test reports.  In a perfect world the shared workspace would only house finalized, read-only reports that are ready for consumption. 

Is there a way for users to build out reports in their “My Workspace” environment while accessing a centralized dataset? Otherwise, would the solution be to load the same pbix into each users’ “My Workspace” for them to build out their own reports?  I hope not as this seems highly inefficient.  Especially since the user would likely need to rebuild any “finalized” reports in the shared workspace.

Could any or all of this be accomplished by publishing an app?

Any tips and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

-Chad

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

What I would suggest is that the users all work within an App Workspace as you suggested above.

The key difference is when the report is ready for consumption you share it via an App from the workspace. THis will allow the users who consume the report to only see the end result, which is also read only. Along with this when App Workspace members make changes it does not automatically update to the App. You still have to manually update the App for the changes to be deployed.

Also in the near future there was an announcement at Microsoft Ignite where a single dataset will be able to be shared across multiple App Workspaces. Once this is done, you could then have a single dataset, and a development App Workspace and a Production App Workspace.

[Trudgeon]

Thanks, Gilbert.  I'll look into creating an App to store the consumable reports.

[GilbertQ]

The App experience will be expanding as time goes on for consumable reports, for example where users will be able to make their own copies based on the initial reports.