workspaces vs app, what is the difference?

[Rodion]

I'm new to Power BI and I'm ready to share my first dashboard. I am however completely lost in the sharing options. I followed the Guided Learning and I noticed that you can just share a dashboard from the dashboard itsself, but there are also workspaces, apps and content packs. What are they and what are the differences between them? Thanks for your help.

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@Rodion

Workspaces: Personal and App

   Personal - This is your workspace, don't share any company level reports from here as you are the only one that can access them. Use it for your own reports, or sharing privately.

    App - The App workspace was call "Group Workspace" - this workspace allows multiple admins and should be the platform by which you share dashboards or reports to a wider audience. That way, if there are any personell changes, nothing is affected.

Apps - Are a 1 to 1 map to an App workspace and provide end users a read only experiance for the particular objects in the workspace that you want them to see. Valuable way of sharing, and the only way to share if you use the Premium license.

Content Packs - Being deprecated, don't use them. (I'm personally glad these are going away, just a nightmare to manage and changes or delete could cause major issues downstream.)

BTW - you can also now just share a report, you are no longer bound by sharing things via a dashboard.

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@Rodion

Workspaces: Personal and App

   Personal - This is your workspace, don't share any company level reports from here as you are the only one that can access them. Use it for your own reports, or sharing privately.

    App - The App workspace was call "Group Workspace" - this workspace allows multiple admins and should be the platform by which you share dashboards or reports to a wider audience. That way, if there are any personell changes, nothing is affected.

Apps - Are a 1 to 1 map to an App workspace and provide end users a read only experiance for the particular objects in the workspace that you want them to see. Valuable way of sharing, and the only way to share if you use the Premium license.

Content Packs - Being deprecated, don't use them. (I'm personally glad these are going away, just a nightmare to manage and changes or delete could cause major issues downstream.)

BTW - you can also now just share a report, you are no longer bound by sharing things via a dashboard.

[swarna]

So what is the difference between publishing a report and giving access to users and publishing an APP?

App-Is this only for a dashboard view, where you go and have a look at all the reports/dashboards you have access to?

Report- This is more individual, and the user needs to remember the link?

REgards,

Swarna

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@swarna Descriptions are important, so I'm going to clarify you question.

We are talking about "Sharing".

App Workspaces - The typical recommendation is to only use these as report development areas. The reason being is that an end user has to search down the workspace first before getting access to the report.

Reports & Dashboards - Show up for the end user in "Shared with Me" - and they can easily search for any report or dashboard without having to try to find it in some workspace that they have access to "read" reports.

Apps - Once again, a seperate area where a user can go to connect to a set or package of information. A practical use case would be something like "Executive Reports", and all relevant reports would be contained within the app.

The other benefit to sharing an App, is that it provides you with 2 layers or psuedo change management. You can make changes to a report in the workspace, verify, and only after you have vetted the change you can reshare or update the App that is shared with end users. Unlike Reports/Dashboards, there is a manual step to push out changes, which can be helpful.

All sharing methods, Reports, Dashboards and Apps have their use cases. I don't recommend adding users in "read" membership to workspaces for the purpose of consuming reports.

[RobLW2]

EDIT: I feel I've cleared up my own understanding thanks to this excellent article - https://www.blue-granite.com/blog/what-are-power-bi-apps

What I find really confusing is why do we have so many levels of access control?

I can go to a report and share this. I suspect I can share this to A/D groups so this makes distributing the report to groups nice and easy.

It would appear I can do the same with Dashboards.

It would also appear that I can do the same with the Workspaces which I assume means all reports/dashboards can be made available to the A/D group if I wanted.

So why and what do I need to publish an app for? I'm not getting my head around what the advantage/point-of having a publish app provides over just sharing the workspace to A/D groups ?

Thanks

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@RobLW2  Different permissions for different objects and purposes.

Here is my take:

Workspaces are for collaboration and a work area for report authors. I don't view them as sharing mechanisms because there are better ways to provide content to my end users. Can you add viewers to Workspaces? "Yes". Should you? "No, not in my opinon". I have to manage levels of permissions, viewers could potentially mess up my reports, and I'm mixing purposes.

Reports & Dashboards: Let me share directly with my users. Great for easy sharing, it shows up in the "Shared with me" section for viewers and they can search for content via a search bar rather than hunting for reports in workspaces. When I update a report, the change is automatically sent to all viewers of the report.

Apps: Allow me to bundle reports and dashboards together. Viewers find these bundles in a seperate section "Apps" and by default they are view only. When I update reports, Apps allow me to have a pseudoe (Dev/Prod) deployment because I can push my updated changes to the Service, test, ensure that everything is good, THEN re-publish the changes to the App. In my opinion, that is one of the greatest benefits of Apps for sharing.

[Anonymous]

You have mentioned that the advantage of App's is that you can wait before you refresh your data again. Is this only possible when you are using Power BI service manually? Or is it also possible to automatically exclude refresh function to the apps through a gateway. Because, I expect that a gateway is also automatically refreshing apps?

Thank you for your answer.

[Rodion]

Thanks @Seth_C_Bauer for the clear explanation. This realy helps!

The only thing I don't understand yet, is how to manage the access to an app once you have created it. In the process of creating an app, you can indicate who has access to this app by selecting their email address, but once you have finished this process, I can't find a way for selecting or deselecting other collegues.

Does anyone (within an organisation) that has the link to the app also have access to the app? Or can you manage the access to an app (in the same way that you can manage the access to a workspace) once you have creaded the app?

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@Rodion Once you publish the app, you just need to go back to the workspace and you should see the "Update App" button in the upper right. Clicking that brings you back to the same dialogue options and you can click on "access" to see who has access to the app. In terms of who can see it, if you toggle the "Entire Organization" - then anyone can. If you select the specific users or groups, you can manage it here any time and just republish the app.