Team Collaboration Within PBI Service

[rvillalobos]

Context: I started implementing PBI in my organization a few month ago as a one person team. I did all the data ETL on one master file that was my first project, publish that to the service, then shared it with people. Every project after that I started by creating a modifying copies of the first master file; now I know there are better ways to reuse data to create multiple reports.

Problem: A second person with similiar PBI experience than me has joined my team and we are having issues on how to share and collaborate within the PBI service. To my understanding, we could recycle the ETL from the master file a create a dataflow in the service, but that way we can not store all of our measures, so that would be a viable option. Best advice I could find online was to have one main semantic model, then connect all of our reports to that model as the data source, but then we are not able to modify the model an adapt it to the specific project.

Question(s): How do team member collaborate in PBI service? What are the best practices for centralizing data within PBI? Is there a feature within PBI service (Pro license) that would allow us to create a semantic model, independent from a report, were we could store all of our tables and measures and then connect our reports to it? 

Any word of advice would be highly appreciated.

[v-huijiey-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @rvillalobos ,

For your first question - how do team members collaborate in PBI services?

My suggestion is to use workspaces.

A workspace is a place to collaborate with coworkers to create collections of dashboards, reports, semantic models, and paged reports.

For more details see:

Roles in workspaces in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Other ways to collaborate can be found in the official documentation below:

Ways to collaborate and share in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

For your second question - the best way to centralize data in PBI?

A good way to do this is with the dataflow you are using, which is a collection of tables created and managed in the workspace of the Power BI service.

For more information on dataflow see:

Creating a dataflow - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

For your third question - does the Pro license allow for the creation of report-independent semantic models, and is it possible to store all the tables and metrics and then connect the report to it?

Go to the workspace in Power BI Service and select New in the upper left corner:

Select the table you want to import in:

Power BI allows users to modify existing data models in Power BI services using operations such as editing relationships, creating DAX metrics, and managing RLS.

Select “Advanced > Data Model Settings > Users can edit the data model in Power BI Services (Preview)”.

In the content list of the workspace, select “More options (...)” for the semantic model. and then select “Open Data Model”.

When you open the data model, you can see all the tables, columns and relationships in the model. The data model can now be edited and any changes are automatically saved.

For more details see:

Edit data models in the Power BI service (preview) - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Now you can share this semantic model and then others can use it.

For more details see:

Introduction to semantic models across workspaces - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Finally, you can refer to this document for information about ETL:

Power BI Extract Transform Load (ETL): Comprehensive Guide 101 | Hevo (hevodata.com)

If you have any other questions please feel free to contact me.

Best Regards,
Yang
Community Support Team

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