Open Group Workspace instead of My Workspace by default

[cmn]

Is it possible to have Power BI web site & Mobile App open straight into a Group Workspace, rather than opening in My Workspace?  We are deploying a solution at a client and all reports are being managed through group workspaces.  They do no have any reports or dashboards sitting under 'My workspace' and would like to be able to update their profile so that it opens immediately onto one of their group workspaces.

An alternative would be to add a link to a dashboard/report in My Workspace that takes you to the group workspace.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@cmn There is no setting that I am aware of that will allow you to change the default workspace. A couple ideas:

After the workspace is created, have the end user save the URL of the group dashboard as a favorites link. This doesn't require anything on the Power BI side and the user gets directed to the page they want.

Your alternative is also viable. You can connect any URL to a dashboard tile, so that when you click the tile the user is taken to a site of you choosing. 

 link look under the "Add a hyperlink to a dashboard tile"

[cmn]

@Seth_C_Bauer Thanks for the suggestion. We have discussed that as an option, but we may stuggle to get C-level users to do that.

Your other suggestion, with the dashboard tile connecting to a URL might work. This is not what I was actually suggestion in my comment. I was actually thinking of being able to do something like clicking "+" create dashboard button, but instead of creating a new dashboard, have the option to create a link to a group dashboard instead.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@cmn I'm trying to understand the purpose behind using a Group for a set of reports for C-levels. The sharing of dashboards is typically the easiest way to appease this group because they are usually the read only user. Can you help me understand your scenerio, I may be able to recommend different ways to deploy if you'd like.

[cmn]

@Seth_C_Bauer The reason for groups, is the ability to add administrators to the dashboards / reports.  I we just share one from My Workspaces, or create a content pack, the I am the only one who can administer the report / content pack.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@cmn I must not understand the entire scope.

I think we both view a group as the collaborative workspace for people who need to create/manage/modify a set of reports. From what I read though, it appears you are wanting to share from the "Report Owner Group" to a "Report Consumer Group". My preference for "C-levels" in this case,would be to share to directly to their workspace from your "Report Owner Group". I guess I don't see a reason why you would try to share to another "Report Consumer Group".. The direct share is the most self explanatory for the end user who only need to "Read", it gives the option to have one-off specific reports if needed, and is easily managed from your one "Report Owner Group". I don't see the reason to create a group workspace for all of them to belong in purely for read only access. They are the least technical, and just want to view Dashboards/report. Especially for these users, I don't want to expose reports or datasets to confuse them. I want one click from the dashboard to the report and ease of use.

- Just some thoughts.

[cmn]

@Seth_C_Bauer Thanks again for you feedback.  It's appreciated.  I'm not sure what you mean by "Report Owner Group" and "Report Consumer Group".  I think the whole governance/administration capabilities of Power BI is still very immature. I guess the main problem I have with me sharing reports and dashboards from 'My Workspace', is that I am the only person who can edit these reports/dashboards.  As I am a consultant, what happens when my role finishes, and I need to hand over to the internal IT dept?  At least with a a Group Workspace, I can make other people administrators of the group.

If you were developing a suite of reports & dashboards for a large number of users (from C-level down to sales rep), what approach would you take?  Some key requirements are:

• Be able to give access to both individual users and ad/email groups
• Enforce read only access
• Hide the underyling datasets
• Multiple administrators or be able to change the administrator/owner
• Prevent people from removing the reports/dashboards

I played around with content packs, but my fear is that people will modify the reports, and when new versions are published, they will end up with many copies, causing much confusion as to which report is the "real" one.  I also don't like the fact that it exposes the datasets.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@cmn Let's clear the air on a couple things. I agree on the "My Workspace", it is not the way to share on a corporate level.

Also agree on Content Packs - it's not an easily understandable concept for large numbers of users to grasp. (May be relevant for smaller groups, but with alot of explanation)

What I meant by "Report Owner Group" is the PBI Group that is created for the people you will hand off all the report management and sharing.

Your use case is very similiar to several I've been a part of thus far (I'm also a consultant).

Here is how I see your scenerio, and some ideas based on my implementations.

1) Access to individual or AD group is supported in all sharing scenerio's - not an issue

2) Read only - Shared dashboards (simple, clean, easy to explain to end users). Everyone has their own workspace, here are your company dashboards, and how you use them.

3) Hide Dataset, you have to use Dashboard sharing, Content packs expose all parts of a dashboard. (reports/datasets)

4) Multiple admins - Create one PBI Group to manage reports and sharing to end users. This could be multiple groups based on different departments, but this depends on size of company or number of reporting groups, etc. But suffice to say, I think there should be only a limited number of sources for reports to be shared from, it's easier to manage, and also easier to track down where issues come from.

5) There is the all or nothing approach to permissions in PBI Groups right now, so that's hard to manage. Currently the only way to manage some aspects of a large deployment is in the business process, and not the tool yet. In my implementations, I recommend that all reports be created and managed in PBIX files - this assumes that the backend allows for Direct Query or live connection. For large implementations, I hope this is the case (otherwise there may be a size issue with the file 250mb).

Using the PBIX files, you can create a process for a "hacked" way of version control. Either in a file share location like Sharepoint, TFS, or something where you can have a backup of your reports, and know who modified a file. That way, if anything happens to reports in the service, there is minimal downtime to re-deploy. This excludes Dashboards as those only exist in the Service, but those are easy to re-create.

I look forward to more of the governance/admin capabilities as well, but in the mean time I've found that there are ways in which I can replicate what I need in the business process to get me to a comfortable point.

This isn't to say that there is only one approach, but I find that in order to get early adoption for any new BI project, the easier it is to use for end users, the better. Creating shared PBI Groups to share dashboards or content to another PBI Group for end users seems unecessarily complicated to me and harder to explain

- Got kinda long winded there, would love to hear feedback/what your approach has been.

[TimBush]

Hi Eno,

Thanks for this post - very useful.

There is a small problem with that approach and backing up the reports in .pbix files.

You can't deploy a PBIX file to a group at the moment. How are you getting around this issue when you have a group of Power BI users making changes to the reports?

[cmn]

@Seth_C_Bauer  Thanks again for the long post.  I think I understand where you are coming from now, with "Report Owner Groups" and "Report Consumer Groups".  It was not my intention to have one group for report owners, and another group for users/consumers.  Rather there would be a single group used by both sets of users.  

However the idea to just use the group for owners/admins, and share the dashboards into people's 'My Workspace' is a good one.  

This way we can use the group to allow multiple people to have admin access to the group (and allow us to handover to the business IT team when we are finished).  Simply sharing the dashboards outside of the group is definitely a better solution.  At least in the short term until the governance/adminh story is matured. The ability to share outside the group is the piece of the puzzle that I couldn't see.

Once slight problem I can see is that people are able to remove the dashboards that have been shared with them, but that is probably unlikely.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@cmn You can put a positive spin on your final point, the dashboard can always be re-shared easily if accidentilly deleted. Thanks for reading the novel 🙂