Cross-workspace dashboard tile best practices

[JrBIAnalyst]

My organization is divided into 10 functional areas (Operations, Maintenance, Human Resources, etc.). We have a robust BI presence, and each functional area has its own Power BI workspace, its own analysts, and its own leadership subteam that all use a dashboard in that workspace for reporting tailored to the strategic needs of the functional area. There's also an 11th workspace for the company as whole, which has a combination of roll-up reports and other things that are important or useful at a company wide level.

Over the years, one of our bigest challenges has been the administrative burden of reports that cross functional areas. For example, our HR team has a report on vacancy rates. That's housed in the company-wide workspace, but it has the capability to filter by functional area, and there's interest from the leadership teams in each functional area to have their specific vacancy rate on their dashboards. Or, going the other way, Operations might have a report that lives in their workspace, but is important enough to the overal company that we want to pin a visual from it into the company-level dahsboard as well.

In these situations, we've experimented with a few options:

• Static (text) link in on a tile the second workspace. Pros: Easy to maintain, alleviates permissions issues. Cons: no live visual on the second dashboard and users must click through rather than being able to see values at a glance. 
• Cross post the report to all 11 workspaces. Pros: each dashboard has a live view of the data and current values can be seen in the dashboard without clicking through. Cons: Major administrative hurdle, easy for data to fall out of sync, massive duplication of work, and the analyst responsible for the report needs access to every workspace.
• Single page report in FA workspaces drawing on the dataset living in the company workspace. Pros: Only one data set to maintain and the data shown in the FA dashboards is current without clicking through to another workspace. Cons: Still have to manage lots of reports (even if they're small and simple), we've had issues with bookmark persistence, and the HR analyst reponsible for the report still needs permissions to every workspace.

The ideal (albeit not currently possible) approach as far as I can tell would be for an analyst in the FA in question who also has access to the company-wide workspace to be able to pin a tile across workspaces - in other words, go into the report in the company-wide workspace and pin a visual from that report into a dashboard in their functional area workspace.

What are folks thoughts on the best ways to handle this? Are there other approaches we could take? Are there other benefits or risks to these approaches that we should be considering?

[JrBIAnalyst]

Thanks @v-xiaoyan-msft.

Unfortunately, the use of separate workspaces is a crucial aspect of our organizational structure and deeply ingrained in our reporting practices. Given our highly distributed reporting infrastructure, many individuals possess publishing rights to their respective functional area workspaces. Although data accessibility is widespread within functional areas, security concerns arise when crossing those boundaries. This decentralization renders RLS ineffective, as those with publishing rights aren't bound by RLS restrictions. (To continue the HR example, all the analysts in HR are authorized to access all of HR's data. Analysts in Ops, on the other hand, should not have unfettered access to HR's data, which they would if both groups were publishing to the same workspace.) Are there ways to ensure data security with mutliple publishers in the same workspace?

While we do use apps, the problem is that one of the core uses of Power BI in our organization is for leaders in each functional area to review the app for their functional area as a one-stop shop for the things they need to know about their team. This means that if there's a cetnralized report (like in my HR example) it needs to be present in each of those apps, and thus in each of those workspaces. 

Broadly, I think you took my example of the HR analyst backwards. They don't need access to the data in those 10 workspaces. They have the data - what they need is to be able to publish a report to those 10 different workspaces. As I noted in my original post, this isn't impossible, and its a method we've used. As you suggested, we use a single central semantic model and publish reports drawing from it in each workspace. However, its still a major administrative burden both to keep all of those reports consistent and to make sure that everyone who has reports that wind up being used this way gets the permissions they need to publish them.

[v-xiaoyan-msft]

Hi @JrBIAnalyst ,

Power BI currently does not support pinning a tile across workspaces directly.

Instead of duplicating reports across workspaces, consider publishing Power BI apps. This allows you to bundle dashboards, reports, and datasets into a single package that can be shared across the organization. Users with the necessary permissions can access the app and see the data relevant to them. and instead of giving the HR analyst access to every workspace, consider giving them access to only the datasets they need. This can be managed through the workspace's access control settings.

Publish an app in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

You may create a shared semantic model in a central workspace that can be used by multiple reports across different workspaces. This ensures that there is a single source of truth and reduces the need for duplicating datasets.

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

Implement RLS on your datasets to control data access. This way, you can have one report with data filtered based on the user's role or department, reducing the need for separate reports for each functional area.

Row-level security (RLS) with Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Best regards.
Community Support Team_Caitlyn