Premium Capacity - What happens to workspaces when moved in and out of a dedicated premium capacity?

[rodneyc8063]

So my company is just begining our journey with PBI and purchased premium capacity and I wanted to clarify a few things to make sure I understand whats going on before flipping any switches 🙂

Reading through this article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-admin-premium-manage#:~:text=Assigning%20the....

So after purchasing PBI premium, I can see there is a section in the Admin portal under "Capacity Settings" -> Set up a new capacity

After setting up the capacity, there is a step that asks to assign workspaces to a capacity.

My organization already has a number of licensed PRO users, we just want to add the additional capability of letting more users have "view" access to reports

Now here I have a few questions

Im assuming that by simply creating and setting up a capacity, that really nothing happens to our current workspaces or enviroment is that accurate? (Im asking as I have a team member that is quite concerned about flipping the switch and I just wanted to confirm).

From what I gather, we can freely move a workspace in and out of a dedicated premium capacity all day long - So is it safe to assume that the contents of the workspace wont be impacted?

I was also reading this article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-premium-capacity-manage

And it notes the following regarding moving workspaces in and out of dedicated premium capacity

Note that removing a workspace from a Premium capacity may have negative consequences resulting, for example, in shared content becoming unavailable to Power BI Free licensed users, or the suspension of scheduled refresh when they exceed the allowances supported by shared capacities.

So just to get this straight

Lets say I have workspace A currently located in shared capacity. Only people that have access to this workspace AND a PRO license can access this workspace (Im hoping I got it loosely right so far here).

So anyone thats "free"/non-pro within my organization can not even login to the Power BI service at this point Im assuming.

Now lets say I purchase and activate dedicated premium capacity - But I have not assigned a workspace to the dedicated capacity. 

Im assuming my "free"/non-pro colleagues can now login to PBI service, but dont see anything since there are no workspaces on a dedicated premium capacity.

Now finally I move workspace A into a dedicated capacity, and share an app out to my organization. At this point Im guessing everyone can see it, access the app and its contents etc (if all permissions are correct to this point).

Lets say now I realize, oh crud - workspace A is the wrong one! I move workspace A back into shared capacity, and at this point all my "free"/non pro users should then also lose access to the app from workspace A. So everyone is back to seeing nothing basically.

I guess Im trying to understand what happens to a workspace and how "free users" will see things

Thanks for any help

[Sumanth_23]

hi @rodneyc8063- you have pretty much summarized everything correctly - Premium offers dedicated capacity for your workspaces, access to to non-licensed users within your organization to reports & supports additional workloads (additional workloads: AI (Cognitive Services), Paginated Reports, and Dataflows)

But for the particular scenario you have mentioned if you move a workspace from Premium to Shared capacity then non-Pro users will lose access and will not be able to view the reports

Please mark the post as a solution and provide a 👍 if my comment helped with solving your issue. Thanks! 

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

What will happen is that users will always see the App that they have been granted permissions to.

the difference will come if they are a free user and the app is not in premium capacity it will prompt them to upgrade their license.

If the App is in Premium capacity they will be able to view the App.

The users who are assigned permissions to view the app will not change based on the capacity setting.

[rodneyc8063]

Hi @GilbertQ 

Just making sure I understand correctly

So if I share out an app from a workspace in a dedicated premium capacity - Share this out to users, and then move the workspace back into shared capacity - The users will still see a "link" to the app in their account, but it will just tell them to upgrade their license?

And Im guessing if I happen to move the workspace back from shared to premium, free/non pro end users will then be able to see the content all over again?

Thank you much!

[GilbertQ]

Hi there

Yes that is 100% correct.