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andynz
Frequent Visitor

Sharing data with an office 365 Group

As a BI team we create and develop the underlying datasets / reports / dashboards.

 

What we would like to do is publish all this information to an Office 365 group (we have pro licences).  However we (the BI team) do not want access to the emails documents etc of the office 365 group or see the discussion. We  want to have the ability to maintain the office 365 groups power bi reports only.   Has anyone seen work arounds for this situation?  I cant find anything on this forum.

 

We think this is a better way of doing this rather than using content packs.

 

Thanks for the help!

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

@andynz I'll cover a few things you are probably already aware of, but I don't want to assume.

Fundementally, Power BI is set up to give the most flexibility to end users to allow them to do their own reporting. Depending on the organization, this changes the role of the BI team to focus more on the set up and additions to models, company level reports, and focusing on extending data access to groups of people in a focused and meaningful way so that they can do their own analysis.

The entire way Power BI is set up "Personal Workspace" vs. "Single landing page for all users" drives this point home.

As such, Group workspaces work well as a single "Creation" area for a (BI Team) to collaborate and manage solutions. From that one location any (BI Team Member) with access can make changes that could potentially effect a wide audience depending on how things are shared. (Dashboard or Content Pack)

Trying to have end users use a Group workspace as a "Single landing page" and trying to manage things in that respect goes against the grain of how the tool is designed. Can you wrangle it into that solution, "yes", but it doesn't work as you would expect.

That being said, if you are admins of a Group Workspace, you can do and see everything. You can make other people members with read only permissions but there is no granularity in such a way that you describe.

As an aside, an approach I use often is to manage things like described above in a Group workspace and create AD security or distribution groups to share content with.

Company Level or "Main" reports get shared via Dashboards (Which is the easiest method for end users to understand)

Fully curated datasets get put into Content Packs.

 

... Kinda went off on a rant. hope that helps.

If your team creates content in a Group, you already manage, own and can maintain all reports. You can't manage what everyone does in Power BI.


Looking for more Power BI tips, tricks & tools? Check out PowerBI.tips the site I co-own with Mike Carlo. Also, if you are near SE WI? Join our PUG Milwaukee Brew City PUG

View solution in original post

2 REPLIES 2

@andynz I'll cover a few things you are probably already aware of, but I don't want to assume.

Fundementally, Power BI is set up to give the most flexibility to end users to allow them to do their own reporting. Depending on the organization, this changes the role of the BI team to focus more on the set up and additions to models, company level reports, and focusing on extending data access to groups of people in a focused and meaningful way so that they can do their own analysis.

The entire way Power BI is set up "Personal Workspace" vs. "Single landing page for all users" drives this point home.

As such, Group workspaces work well as a single "Creation" area for a (BI Team) to collaborate and manage solutions. From that one location any (BI Team Member) with access can make changes that could potentially effect a wide audience depending on how things are shared. (Dashboard or Content Pack)

Trying to have end users use a Group workspace as a "Single landing page" and trying to manage things in that respect goes against the grain of how the tool is designed. Can you wrangle it into that solution, "yes", but it doesn't work as you would expect.

That being said, if you are admins of a Group Workspace, you can do and see everything. You can make other people members with read only permissions but there is no granularity in such a way that you describe.

As an aside, an approach I use often is to manage things like described above in a Group workspace and create AD security or distribution groups to share content with.

Company Level or "Main" reports get shared via Dashboards (Which is the easiest method for end users to understand)

Fully curated datasets get put into Content Packs.

 

... Kinda went off on a rant. hope that helps.

If your team creates content in a Group, you already manage, own and can maintain all reports. You can't manage what everyone does in Power BI.


Looking for more Power BI tips, tricks & tools? Check out PowerBI.tips the site I co-own with Mike Carlo. Also, if you are near SE WI? Join our PUG Milwaukee Brew City PUG

Thanks for the response.  We have been using the method you described above which works but many of users would prefer to view their information in the 365 group they belong to.  The reason being is that many conservations and documents are ready located within this group and they want to have their reporting in there also.  Great to think we have come to the same conclusion. 

 

The problem lies the ownership of printing a power bi report into a 365 group is that you must be a member. Many of these 365 groups were started before power bi reports were considered. The bi team want the ability to print reports into these groups but don't want access to the other parts of the groups - emails, documents. 

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