How to share enterprise reports with SSAS connection

[brodtgaard]

Dear community

We have several clients who have looked forward to leverage their huge SSAS MOLAP investment with the new MS front end: Power BI

A common scenario is that most of the BI reports are created from a central BI department / IT and only few reports are created by business users. Most users are casual viewers of dashboards and reports, some users need to create own dashboards consisting of pinned object from the centralized distributed reports. In most cases, uses shouldn’t be allowed to alter anything in the reporting portal.

I would like to have inputs and discuss best practice on how to distribute centralized distributed reports when the main data source is onprem Analysis Services.

Here is my understanding of how it could be:

1. Enterprise Gateway is installed and connections are made to all relevant cubes.
2. A lot of reports are created in Power BI Desktop with a live connection to cube X.
3. Now we want to publish these reports. We do that to an Office 365 group instead of the personal workspace, so that several developers can contribute to the same “enterprise report product”.
4. When published in the portal we create nice dashboards with report content.

Now we have a lot of reports and dashboards in the same group. Now we should choose either to

1. give users access rights to the group so it will pop up inside their Power BI or
2. define a set of content packs that the users can subscribe to

Pros with A) Users will just have to receive a link to the group and the content will be all set.

Cons with A) To my knowledge you cannot restrict users in a group to only have read access to content. That implies that users can create own versions of reports etc.

Pros with B) Users can choose among several content packs and pick out the relevant.

Cons with B) Users are forced to choose among several content packs and pick out the relevant. The reports and dashboards now resides as a copy in the users own workspaces and the can make their own versions.

I either of situation A) and B) there will in Power BI exist a dataset per report. If e.g. a content pack consists of eight reports, all using the same cube, there will be eight datasets displayed for the user. Is there any way to get rid of that?

None of the options seems to me very elegant. Have I missed some important features?

[olejakobk]

Hi,

I am trying to find good ways of handling this myself. I have come down to what you refer to as scenario A. But from my testing, I can set users either as "Member" or "Admin". Futher, I can set that as privacy setting for the group that "Members can only view Power BI content".

The users cannot see data source object, edit reports/dashbaord or create anything within the group.

So that leaves scenario A with only Pros.

/Ole-J