PL-300 – Section 37: Part 4 Section 6 – Create and Manage Workspaces

274. Create and Configure a Workspace

Hello. Now, up till now we’ve been using the private workspace called My Workspace. You can share items from it, but it’s not really designed to have a big solution being there. However, workspaces, which can hold data sources, datasets, reports, and dashboards can be more than just My Workspace, you can have a specific workspace for a specific project, and then invite people along to collaborate with you. So, this section is all about creating and managing workspaces, which does include apps, which have a similar type of role, except apps are workspaces that are published. So, let’s create a new workspace. So, here we are at home and I go to the workspaces, and you can see we’ve currently got My Workspace and there’s no other workspaces. So, I’m going to go to the bottom and I’m going to create a workspace.

So, first thing, as I said before Power BI Service, and Power BI Desktop for that matter, keep getting updated. And so this is an upgraded workspace, you may have a classic workspace, you may be in an organisation that has lots of classic workspaces, and then you might want to think about what do I want? A classic workspace to have maximum compatibility with what others are used to? Or do I want the newer workspace? The new workspaces, you’ve got better management of access to content because the roles that you can use for people to be able to access it can be more granular can be more refined, and there may be a bit more flexibility as well. However, if you are used to Power BI and you use content packs, they’re not supported in the new workspace. So, what we’re going to do is I’m going to name this workspace. So, let’s call it Workspace, and see if it’s available, and it is. It needs to be a unique name, so I wouldn’t actually just call it workspace. Maybe, I’ve got a project and I’m calling this Project 001. And you can give a description to this workspace, this is a trial workspace.

Now, you can see that there is an advanced section or first of all, you can upload a workspace image. This needs to be fairly small under 45 kilobytes and PNG or JPEG. And looking at the advanced, a contact list. These are people who are notified about any issues occurring in the workspace. So by default, it’s the administrators, but we can add others by using specific users or specific groups. So, maybe, I wanted Jane to be in there, no problem. The rest of the things I don’t think you will be using, maybe, except for the bottom one, that’s Workspace OneDrive. This allows you to say, there is a Microsoft 365 group, where SharePoint document library file storage is available. So, if you haven’t got SharePoint, then don’t worry about it dedicated capacity, you can see that it is greyed out this is for Power BI Premium. You might want to say I want a certain number of calls set up for this particular workspace, develop a template so that’s for sharing outside of your organisation. This is one you may choose to use.

So, the app is a published version of the workspace, so is it just that workspace admins can update the workspace or do you want to be able to delegate users who are contributors to be able to update the app as well? So, I’ll check that, click save, and there is our new workspace. So, I can go into workspaces, we used to just see My Workspace but now we see my Project 001, I can change which one I’m currently looking at by going to workspaces. And if I want to adjust any of the settings, I go to My Workspace, dot-dot-dot (…), and I go to workspace settings, and I can re-change anything that I previously had. I can also delete the workspace as well. You may notice that there are now three tabs at the top. So, the dedicated capacity has now gone into a tab of its own for premium users and then if you’re using Azure Data Lake Gen2 Storage account, then this can be configured but that’s way outside the scope of this particular course.

So, this is how you create and configure a workspace.

275. Assign Workspace Roles

Now, we have our new workspace. Project 001 workspaces. There are designed for collaboration, we need some people, otherwise there’s not much point actually having a workspace.

So, let’s click on the dot-dot-dot (…) next to the workspace and go to workspace access. So, I’m set up as the admin and the person who has set up the workspace. So, we can add admins, members, contributors. In fact, we can also add viewers as well. So, I’m going to add Jane as one. And as I just said, the admin members, contributors and viewers, but what does that all mean? What is the difference between each one of them? Well, admins, while the just like me what we’ve just done, we can update and delete the workspace and of course, we’ve created the workspace in the first place. We can add and remove people including give admins so be careful if you give a somebody pays admin rights a second person because they. They might remove you, potentially from the admin. And you’ve got that checkbox right at the bottom to allow contributors to update the app for the workspace. So an admin. So members can do the following. And of course, admins can do everything that members can do. They can add members, but not administrators. They can publish an app or change the permissions or update an app, or share an item or an app, allow others to reshare the items and feature apps on colleagues’ homes. So, it’s all about managing adding members and updating apps.

Now, contributors, they can also update an app, but only if allowed, you saw that checkbox. And you can feature dashboards and reports on colleagues home, and the rest of it is content. So create, edit and delete content in the workspace. So previously, for members, we were looking at apps wherever we can share them, contributors can actually Do things with the content, they can publish reports delete content, they can create a report based on a data set, and they can copy a report.

Now, if they’ve got permissions on the gateway, we’ve had a look at Gateway a few few videos ago. And permissions for gateways are set up separately, you can schedule the data refreshes and modify the gateway connection settings. And then finally, viewers and of course contributors, members and admins can do everything that viewers can do, can view and interact with a licence, but they will either need their own power pro bi licence, there’s no such thing as a Power Pro viewer licence. Alternatively, they could have a Power Pro free licence if the workspace is in one of those really expensive Power BI premiums. And they can also read data stored in workspace data flows. What on earth our data flows, I haven’t heard about them before.

So, if I just click on Add and claws we can see this person has been added. In this project 001 workspace we have discover content exactly as we’ve had with get data we’ve had create new content, and we’ve got data flows. And if you click on this, you get to this dialogue box and this web page and you will see that data flows are entities, objects in the common data model using Azure Data Lake storage den to data lake storage is Gentoo especially is for big data.

Now, this isn’t an Azure cost like AZ dash 900. To know about data flows really goes way beyond what we need to know in Power BI. So hopefully now, you know, roughly the difference between admin members, contributors, and viewers. Admins can do anything including adding or removing people, including of admins or deleting gob data in the workspace. Members They can add members, and contributors and viewers. But equally important, they can also update an app or sharing an item or sharing an app. Contributors can update an app if allowed. But they can also add, edit and delete can publish content. And viewers can view and interact with an item if they’ve got sufficient licence. So, to get into all of this, go to the workspace, click on the dot-dot-dot (…) and go to workspace access. So, if you just take a step back, admins, members, contributors, they are all read write roles. viewers are read only. Why is this important? If you go back a few videos, we were talking about role level security. Role level security is only enforced for members who are viewers. So, if I put Susan as a viewer any thing that I share with Her in this workspace, which has role level security, Susan will access according to the role of security. Anything that Jeanne does because member is not just read what read write, she will have access to the full data set. So, if you’re using our OLS role level security, make sure you put them as a viewer

276. Providing Access to Datasets

So, we have a new workspace, and we’ve invited users to it. But, it’s a bit empty. No dashboards, no reports, no datasets. No datasets? Hm. What I’m going to do is I’m going to get a dataset from another workspace. So, I’m going to go from the My workspace. So, I’m going to go to datasets, and there’s going to be a copy button about here somewhere. Create report, Refresh now, Schedule refresh, View related…, maybe, it’s in the dot-dot-dot (…). No, there isn’t a copy. Hm. So, what can we do? Well, you could always go to your Power BI Desktop, and go to File publish, Publish to Power BI. And you can republish it again, to another destination, another workspace. But notice, I was trying to copy dataset, and it wasn’t happening. What if I copied a report? Is that possible? So, let’s go back to Project001. You’ll see you got no dashboards, no reports, and no datasets.

Now, I can’t copy dashboards either. So, you can see no buttons there. Probably because dashboards are related to work reports, multiple reports, and you haven’t got all of these reports there. And also, different people might want different things on their dashboards. However, we do have a copy for reports. So, there it is at the top, at the right-hand side. Save a copy. So, I’m going to call this NoRLS001. And I’m going to go to Project001. That’s my destination workspace. Click Save. Successfully saved. Let’s go into Project001. And notice now, we’ve not only got a report, we’ve also got the dataset. So, when you copy the report, the dataset comes with it. And so, can I create a new report based on this dataset? Definitely I can.

Now, if you’re a administrator, and you’re going, “oh hey hang on, “I don’t want this to happen, “I don’t want people to be able to copy reports, and datasets across workspaces.” You can stop it from happening by going to settings, Admin portal, the Tenant settings, that’s organisation, and look for the Workspace settings. And here we have “Use datasets across workspaces”, so this can be enabled, so I can disable it, or re-enable it, apart from specific security groups, or for everybody except specific security groups.

Now, what is the effect of disabling this? Well, firstly, it takes about 15 minutes for it to really filter through. Will that copy reports across workspaces that we just did? That’s not available. If you are in a report based on a shared dataset, then you won’t be able to edit the report. It won’t be suggesting any datasets which are outside of the ones that you actually have in the current workspace, or where you are not a member. Basically, the datasets are siloed to ones that do have more active permission for.

Now, if you’re wondering, “Okay, how do I setup “these specific security groups?” I had look at that when we were looking at endorsing datasets. So, please, go back a few videos, and have a look at that. So in this video, we had a look at how to copy across reports from one workspace to another. You go to Reports, and you click Save a copy. And the dataset goes along with it. Alternatively, you could just republish it, from say, Power BI Desktop.

277. Configure and Update a Workspace App

So workspaces are a good way to allow collaboration. Some people have got read write access for datasets, reports, dashboards and some have just got read access.

Now, this is largely used the developmental stages, not the finished product. When you want a finished product to be given out more generally, then this is when you can use apps. So apps contain the same sort of things, datasets, reports and dashboards. However, it’s the presentation which is slightly different. So, I’m back in home and I’ll to my workspace. And I’m just going to share a couple more objects into Project001 and of course any related objects that it needs. So, I’ve shared this report, I’m now going into my report and I’m going to create a new dashboard, I’m going to pin some things. So, this is the Project001 dashboard. And I’ll go into another report and I’ll share this as well. Wait, I’ll just refresh the data. This dataset, it often needs to be refreshed, that’s okay. So, I’ll just pin this, I’m just wanting some sample stuff. So, here we have our new project dashboard. Now, if I go into the Project001, I have some new things on the right hand side, included in-app.

Now, this isn’t there for my workspace, there is no included in-app. So, you cannot start apps from my workspace, it’s got to be a different workspace. And so we’ve got that in reports and we haven’t got that in datasets, but it should be obvious by now that if you are creating a reports (indistinct) then the dataset will be included in whatever capacity is needed. So, I’m going to say, yes, I want both of these reports to be included in this app. In fact, I’m going to have a third report, which I’m not going to include. So, let’s go to this one and copy that into there as well. So, I’m not going to include this in the app, just so you can see that there is a difference between the workspace and the app. So no thank you to that one, but I do want the dashboard.

Now, what happens if you got a dashboard that relies on a couple of reports, but you’re not going to be including both of the reports? Well, you get this message that says, this report is used by one dashboard in the app. So, what does that mean? It means that if you create the app, the dashboard will still be there but it won’t include any tiles from this particular report. So, your choice. Then at the top right, we have publish app. So first of all, we want to give this app a name. So Project001 Finished, for example. So, we need a description. It’s useful anyway. This is Project01 in its final state and if users need help, they can go to mircosoft.com. And you can always upload a logo. Let’s have a colour, I’m going to choose a light blue colour. So, you can see the light blue at the top. It’s useful to have different apps with different colours, so the end user can more easily distinguish which app they’re in.

So, contact information. So, I’m going to show the publisher. So next tab, that’s the second, next tab is the navigation. So, this is what they will see. And currently we have the dashboard followed by the reports. I’m going to add a new section. I’m going to say that this section is going to say dashboards and I’ll move it up, so you’ve got these little things here. So, this dashboard contains absolutely nothing at the moment. I can collapse it, I can expand it, but I want this Project001 to be in this dashboard so I’ll put it in there by clicking on the report and going to which section I want. I’m going to have another section, which is going to be called, Important Reports and I’m going to have noRLS001 in there. And then you probably guessed it, an unimportant report. And I’ll have noRLS2 in there. Just to give an idea of what sort of things you can have. You can also hide a particular report from navigation. So, if you did that, well there is a report link to get it directly. And we can also have a new link, so for support click here and again, I will go to microsoft.com. I’ll open it up in a new tab. It could be in the content area, so the bit on the right hand side of all of this or in the current tab. I’ll put it in the content area and I’ll have this in the unimportant report section. Then we have permissions. So, the entire organisation or specific individuals or groups, so you can have up to 100 individuals, but you’ll probably find them easier to be in a group. And then you can just alter the groups as you want. So in the endorse datasets we had, for instance, new security groups set up. So, I could be using that, but I’m going to have it for the entire organisation.

Now, do you want people who have got access to the app to be able to connect to the app’s underlying data sets? So, what that means is that users will be able to use these datasets and build their own reports and dashboards. So, this is called the build permission. Do you want users to be able to make a copy of the reports in this app?

Now, it should be pointed out that people who are going to have access to this app, need to have Power BI Pro licence. The only alternative is if this workspace is in a Power BI Premium workspace, in which case you don’t actually need the end user to have the pro licence, they could have a free licence, but if they want to build, to make a copy, for instance, of reports, they will need a pro licence. So, all people who have an app, the app has to be in a premium workplace or the end user has to have a pro licence. Do you want users to be able to share the app and the app’s underlying dataset using the share permission? Oh, be careful. This is when things can get a bit out of control, perhaps, and you can see learn more about how to do this.

Now, you can also have the app to be installed on the end users automatically. It does take a bit of time, especially if you got a lot of users to do this push installation. You will need to have permission from the admin to be able to do this, to start with and you can see it’s not allowed by default. So, I’m going to publish the app. So, when you probably publish an app, this is a large distribution, might take a while. Typically, it’s five to 10 minutes. So, there it’s published. So, you can either say, here’s the link, so copy the link to clipboard or you can say, go to app, get apps. So, let’s see what’s happened to Jane. So, here is Jane. And we can click on apps. So, the workspaces she has access to are, my workspace and Project001, because we’ve shared it with her previously. That Project001 Finished is not a workspace, it’s an app. So, it won’t be in the workspaces section. So click on apps and it says you don’t have any, but there is a link at the bottom, get apps. So, I’ll get that and you can see there are a lot of apps. We have seen a fair number of these in the past, but at the top left, we have Project001 Finished and this is an organisational app, that previously that category was completely blank. So, now I will get it now and here we are. So, these are my apps.

So, previously this said, you have no apps. So, I’m going to have a look at my Project001 Finished. So, you can see the blue highlighting that we’ve got. We’ve gone into this Project001 dashboard We’ve got important reports. We’ve got unimportant reports. So, I can click on each of these. And we have got, for support click here. And so I wanted it to be in this area, but you’ll notice that this particular web page, microsoft.com it isn’t loading. So, this is why I generally say I want it in a new tab anyway. If we go back to my main user, we are back in the workspace, Project001, as opposed to the dash Project001 Finished. I can make any adjustments. For instance, maybe, I don’t want this report to be shown now.

Now, it will still be there in everybody’s app. The workspace is a development staging area. Until you update the app, any changes you make will not be reflected in the app. So, now if I click update app, let’s put with one change in the description, leave everything else as it is obviously, if we get rid of a report, we get rid of it in the navigation. Let’s update the app. There we go. Go back into Jane. So, I’ll go back into the home, go into the apps. We’ll see that, even though I haven’t updated the app myself, it’s as Jane, that report has now gone. And finally, what I can also do, if I go back into my own user, I can also un-publish the app. So, what this does is uninstalls the app for everybody who’s got it installed, however, it doesn’t affect the workspace. So, the contents of the workspace remains there, it just is the app which gets removed.

Now, just a few points to note. If you are already a workspace member, so if you are a member of the Project001 workspace, then you will automatically be given access to the app. As said, you’ve got a maximum of 100 users if you’re putting in individual users into your app, however, you can do groups and groups themselves, you can have up to 100 users or groups. So basically you only need one or two groups to have thousands of users. Apps can have a maximum of 200 dashboards. Again, probably not a huge problem there and we don’t recommend having hundreds of apps where people don’t actually need them. So, just keep the apps to whom they are necessary and update them whenever you want. So, we’ve got workspaces for development purposes, apps for closer to the finished product.

So, in this video, we have had a look at providing access to a workspace app. We have configured it, we’ve updated it, we’ve even removed it, if necessary. So, they are a useful way of publishing your data to other people who have got this Power BI Pro licence in your tenant, in your organisation, or if it is on a Power BI Premium workspace, to anyone who has got a free licence in your organisation.

• Category: Uncategorized