Disable Personal workspaces

[JoeCrockettACG]

Hello,

Is it possible to disable the auto-creation of personal workspaces while still keeping the license?

My use case: everyone in our organization has an E5, with the Power BI Pro license -- and we want everyone to have a license. But! We cannot recover PersonalGroup type workspaces, so when a person leaves the organization and their account is deleted, we completely lose their Power BI work.

The answer would seem to be to force everyone to use v2 "Workspaces" -- which is a fine answer, but by default everyone gets a personal workspace. Is it possible to continue to have a Power BI Pro license but disable the auto-creation of PersonalGroup workspaces?

Thanks,

Joe

[bcdobbs]

Hi,

Currently not an option but the Power BI roadmap has a feature coming to public preview in September 2022 to allow you to make yourself admin of another users My Workspace.

Improve My workspace governance - Power Platform Release Plan | Microsoft Docs

[otravers]

You can't technically block people from using "My Workspace." Some users have requested it but I haven't seen much traction for that idea:

https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=86809e82-1994-4b92-b343-b16dfef70522

With regards to losing all of an employee's BI work when they leave, they wouldn't have been much of team player if all they've ever done was publishing their own reports to their own workspace without ever sharing them in a shared workspace (or even saving their PBIX in a shared file library). This sounds more like an education and governance issue than a purely administrative one.

If you still feel like you need a safety net to recover datasets/reports before people live, you might be able to list and save them via the REST API. But who's going to sift through all that content and make sense of it? Chances are, anyone who never shared their BI work will have documented nothing. Do you try to salvage every little messy spreadsheet that employees have in their personal OneDrive after they leave?

[JoeCrockettACG]

Thanks for your other version, otravers. I'd argue, from an American fundamental level -- my organization doesn't necessarily believe in team-player first, so I'd love the ability to govern that from an enterprise perspective, so not being able to encourage users first into workspaces is lame. And you're right, listing it all from a REST API perspective is too much.