Forum Discussion
workspaces vs app, what is the difference?
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.
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.
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.
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.