How to deploy my Power BI dashboard?

[Medmbchr]

Hi,

This is my first experience at deploying Power BI dashboards accross an organisation so would appreciate your help.

I have been working on a dashboard during the past 6 months which includes all departments of a company: purchasing, warehouse, sales and planning. I stuck with one dashboard because my data model is standard and whenever I create a new table or new calculations, it's at least used in 2 modules.

Hence, today I have only one pbix file as follow:

Total pages: 30

Purchasing: 10

Warehouse: 9

Sales: 6

Planning: 5

Now we are going to deploy this in either Power BI Premium per User or Pro account, depending on how much refresh is needed:

Purchasing: Pro

Warehouse: PPU

Sales: PPU

Planning: Pro

The number of user is estimated at 4 per department, hence 16 users

Now, how I am supposed to deploy this dashboard?

1) Do I need to create 4 copies of my dashboard and delete pages not related to the concerned department?

2) Can I deploy the whole dashboard and then affect pages per user type/department

3) Each time my data needs some rework, in case 1 do I need to redo my dataset in each of the 4 dashboards?

All in all, I need the best deployment strategy so that the Key User (IT admin) can do simple maintenance since he never worked with Power BI

I need your help please on this.

FYI the data source is an SQL Server Std edition 2014 database so will need to set up a gateway for data refresh.

[BITomS]

Hi @Medmbchr,

To start i'd say there isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer to this, but I think there are 2 ways that you may find useful which you are already alluding to.

To answer your point 2) Can I deploy the whole dashboard and then affect pages per user type/department - technically there is no out of the box feature to allow this, you can vote for this here: https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=2dd57d8f-9e1e-4eb0-8dd1-05a566e522cf - but you could create a workaround which Reza Rad helpfully highlights here (NB. his point on URLs / data security): https://radacad.com/page-level-security-workaround-in-power-bi

However, splitting the reports out may be easier - you can do this without having to make 4 changes for the same change across each dataset. Once you publish the dataset to a workspace, you can re-use this from the 'Get Data' tab in the Home ribbon:

Therefore you could have one dataset and 4 reports pointing to it. Meaning any change would reflect across them all (you will have to be careful a dataset change for 1 report doesn't break another though).

Hope this helps.

[ibarrau · Accepted solution]

Hi. For the following answer I'm assuming the data model is correct and each department is using the same structure, so we can break the data model in 4 because it wouldn't make sense.

Consider that a PowerBi Desktop file is build with two different contents for Power Bi Service (report and dataset). You can create multiple reports from a single dataset. The idea here would be keeping a single unique dataset and four different files connected to the dataset. When you need to modify a data structure you can do it in a single place. When you need to change a visualization in a department you have it in a single report. That way you will always modify in one place, keeping a good maintainability.

In order to migrate your current development to that structure publish the current file to a collaborative workspace. Then try downloading the report from Power Bi Service. A pop up will show asking if you want to download the whole thing as the original or if you want a report connected to the dataset. Pick the report connected to the dataset. Then just remove the pages from a different department and save the current department. Publish the report for let's say sales again to the same workspace. Repeat the process

At the end of the day the workspace should have 1 Dataset and 5 Reports (four for each department and a single one with all the pages that you can keep it deprecated without updates).

Once you finished you can create a PowerBi App with audiences for each department or share each individual report. Make sure the users have ReadAccess to the Dataset at Manage Permission setting.

Regarding the licence, all users must have the same because it is a single dataset. Pick PPU if you need special feature for the dataset, otherwise you can build all with PRO.

I hope that helps

I think you best approach here is thinking