Share report through my Workspace pros and cons

[Kwaritnon]

I have Power Bi Pro and I need to share the report which allows the viewer to interact with it approx 10 pax with a free license. Can someone help to share the advantage and disadvantages if I share the report from My Workspace? or other ways WO purchase PRO license?

[R1k91]

I've just learnt (not tested yet) you can add my workspaces to a capacity.

so you can add my workspaces to an embedded capacity always shut down to prevent users to use artifacts saved in a workspace.
you can enforce people not remove this setting with this setting in admin portal

[R1k91]

my workspace is for user experiment, it's something personal.

my workspace is not for sharing.

simply don't do it.

[ThePBIMaster]

@R1k91 Totally agree, but how does a BI team enforce this?

At the moment, there is no way to stop users sharing reports from their My Workspace. This creates more than one source/version of truth for report consumers. Do you know of a workaround to stop users from sharing from their My Workspace?

[R1k91]

As you said, AFAIK there's no easy way to block this practice.

if you can't block simply "comunicating internally that's a bad practice", maybe you could revoke programmatically dataset sharing trough APIs.

I haven't tried and it may not work but my idea is:

- scan personal worksapces

- pick up datasets permissions

- revoke permissions done to users different from the worksapce owner

everything done programmatically and scheduled

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/put-dataset-user#example-for-updating-s...

[Bernadett37]

Hi. Just out of curiousity, when communicating this internally, how would you explain plainly and clearly to the users why it's not best practice to share from personal workspaces? We have always advised our users not to do it, but if they ask why, I'm not too sure how to explain the rationale behind it. Some might wonder, why is there a functionality available, but getting told not to use it. Thanks.

[bevizzled]

My reply tends to be to see My Workspace in the same light as My Documents; it is linked to them personally, so if they leave the organisation and their account becomes inactive, any content in there will disappear/become unavailable.

[R1k91]

I simply say that my workspace is personal work-area made for personal experiments.

the best practice to share reports is through a Power BI App and not sharing each report separetly.

Power BI App can't be created in personal workspace therefore if you need to share it with others don't put it in personal workspace.

[ThePBIMaster]

Thank you for this. I'll look into it in more detail. 

[otravers · Accepted solution]

Regardless of whether you're sharing from My Workspace or a group workspace, you'll need users to have a Pro license. There are exceptions but they're way more expensive anyway and not relevant when you only have 10 users.

Sharing through My Workspace is usually discouraged as it creates maintenance and governance headaches over the long run. Probably the best way to share is via a Power BI app:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/consumer/end-user-apps