Offline Desktop Solution and Administration?

[Brysonds]

Hi!

I have a unique business case, and wanted to get some insights from the community on how you would approach this scenario, or perhaps there is a resource you could point me to.

Most of the user base at my company uses the web application, and it works great. It's quick, interactive, and supports complete RLS. However, there are pockets of the company that operate out of parts of Asia (especially China) where the web application (or any internet application for that matter) is simply to slow. What takes a few seconds to load in the USA can take minutes in China because of IP filtering by the government. Additionally, these associates commonly travel throughout Asia where it isn't uncommon to have dial-up speed access.

Currently, to solve this issue with network connectivity, they use a different BI tool where the desktop client is installed on their local machine. They simply download the latest version of the desktop tool (with the new datasets) on a monthly basis. Additionally, and this is a big deal, the desktop tool they are using supports row-level security (it's built into the desktop application).

So, the problem I want to solve is how do I roll-out a Power BI solution to these users and replace their existing offline desktop tool with RLS? What would you do? 

Here is one creative solution I've come up with:

1. Send pre-filtered Excel reports to each person's individual OneDrive (I already do this for other BI reports). This covers the RLS aspect because the data is already filtered just for that person

2. Build a Power BI application that connects to those files that were delivered. Possible, but not practical since I will have to create one PBI application for each associate, pointing each application to their specific data in their OneDrive

3. Deploy the pre-developed PBI application also to their OneDrive so they can download the pbix file

4. The excel files in their OneDrive will be overwritten with new data each month, so they won't have to refresh anything on their end, they just simply open the file

The main challenges with this appoach is #2 above (having to create and manually deploy so many PBI applications). This desktop solution is needed for ~150 people. The second challenge is that they will open the desktop client to view their BI reports, and the desktop client is not intended for end-users, it is intended for developers. While we can train them on using the desktop tool, it adds more complexity seeing all the different ribbon features, being able to look at the underlying queries, etc. 

If Power BI had a desktop client that was intended for just reading data, and connected to other pbix files to open in a read-only type of mode and pull in all the pre-built visualizations and data, this would be amazing, but they don't.

What are your thoughts?

[v-xicai]

Hi @Brysonds , 

If you need to set RLS, please see the link Power BI Desktop Dynamic security cheat sheet, which described the detailed steps. Maybe it doesn't work, there are some tips to let it work and test it efficiently. You can also refer to this case .

If you would like the users have the only view permission, you can create security group , see : https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-weekly-service-update-1027/, then add them to the only-view member of workspace, or share the content with them.

Best Regards,

Amy

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Brysonds]

Hi Amy,

Thank you for the replies, but I think you misunderstood the business case.

RLS is built in the desktop, but only works in the web once you've published the application. To my knowledge, there is no way to enforce RLS in the desktop client for end-users. So, if I create a Power BI desktop application that contains RLS and send it to someone else in the company, they will see all the data when the open the desktop file. Sure, they could select the role in the desktop to view the filtered data, but that defeats the purpose. That is the business challenge. They currently have a tool that uses RLS in the desktop file, so one desktop file can be created and shared with 10+ users and they only see their data. Power BI doesn't support RLS in the desktop, it only supports building RLS in the desktop, which is different.