prevent users from changing workspace from pro to premium per user capacity

[davetheteamsguy]

Is there an administrative way to prevent users with a Premium Per user license from changing workspaces from Pro to PPU?  We want to control this administratively to prevent licensing creep.  Documentation states in a round about way that this is possible, but I'm not seeing any setting in the Power BI admin portal for this.

[audreygerred]

Hi! When you add people to a workspace, do not add them as an admin if you do not want them to be able to make changes to the workspace itself. Member and below cannot update the workspace. Roles in workspaces in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

[davetheteamsguy]

We allow our users to create their own workspaces.

[ibarrau]

Hi! You could modify some settings to prevent this. However there is no specific setting for these. How can you control it? First you can prevent users to "Create workspaces", then you can keep your users at workspaces as contributors or viewers. That way users can't modify current workspaces or create new ones in order to make a workspace PPU.

I hope that helps,

[davetheteamsguy]

Thanks for the response, I was hoping the setting was buried somewhere and I was just missing it.  The documentation is pretty misleading and this is a necessary control.  Hopefully a member of the Microsoft PG will see this and consider sending it up the chain.

[ibarrau]

You can add it as an idea at this web: https://ideas.fabric.microsoft.com/

First take a look if it already exists to vote it.

If you allow your users to create, then they are the owners of the workspace and they will be able to change that.

On the other hand you could build a small software with the Power Bi Rest API to create workspaces with the API using a Service Principal. But it sounds like a lot of effort just for this. I would talk with the users explaning why it's important to keep it in pro.

Regards

[davetheteamsguy]

Is there at least a way to administratively set the default license type when a user with PPU licensing creates a new workspace?  It appears to default to the highest level licensing when a new workspace is created.

[ibarrau]

I don't think it works like that. I'm PPU too and when I click on create workspace by default it uses PRO shared capacity. That's changed manually for sure.

[davetheteamsguy]

I confirmed that it defaults to Premium in our tenant every time, and across multiple users.  I even created a Pro workspace to see if that would change the default for the next time I created a workspace, but it did not.  The next workspace defaulted to Premium.

Maybe there is a setting that controls that?

[ibarrau · Accepted solution]

I have checked once again and no setting for keeping a default capacity when creating the workspace. It could be some browser cache with previous configuration.

The only alternative would be keeping all users as contributors at workspace. Then build a simple app that creates workspaces with service principal authentication, they can loging, they won't know how it's creating and the app automatically creates it and assign them as contributors.

Otherwise you should talk with users and be serious with the importance of standards of the company like creating workspaces as PRO and not PPU.

Regards