DA-100 Microsoft Power BI – Part 4 Section 6 – Create and manage workspaces

1. Create and Configure a Workspace

Hello. Now, up to now we’ve been using the private workspace called My Workspace. You can share items from it, but it’s not really designed to have a big solution being there. However, workspaces which can hold data sources, datasets reports and dashboards can be more than just My Workspace. You can have of a specific workspace for a specific project and then invite people along to collaborate with you. So this section is all about creating and managing workspaces which does include apps which have a similar type of role, except apps are workspaces that are published. So let’s create a new workspace. So here we are at home and I’ll go to the workspaces and you can see we’ve currently got My Workspace and there’s no other workspaces.

So I’m going to go to the bottom and I’m going to create a workspace. So, first thing, as I said before, power Bi service and Power Bi desktop for that matter, keep getting updated. And so this is an upgraded workspace. You may have a classic workspace, you may be in an organization that has lots of classic workspaces. And then you might want to think about do I want a classic workspace to have maximum compatibility with what offers are used to or do I want the newer workspace? The new workspaces, you’ve got better management of access to content because the roles that you can use for people to be able to access it can be more granular, can be more refined, and there may be a bit more flexibility as well. However, if you are used to Power Bi and use content packs, but they’re not supported in the new workspace.

So what we’re going to do is I’m going to name this workspace. So let’s call it Workspace to see if it’s available. And it is, it needs to be a unique name. So I wouldn’t actually just call it Workspace. Maybe I’ve got a project and I’m calling this project One and you can give a description to this Workspace. This is a trial workspace. Now, we can see that there is an advanced section. First of all, you can upload a Workspace image. This needs to be fairly small, under 45 KB in PNG or JPEG. Looking at the advanced contact list, these are people who are notified about any issues occurring in the workspace. So by default it’s the administrators. But we can add others by using specific users or specific groups. So maybe I wanted Jane to be in there, no problem.

The rest of the things I don’t think you’ll be using, maybe except for the bottom one much workspace OneDrive. This allows you to say there is a Microsoft 365 group where SharePoint Document Library file storage is available. So if you’ve got SharePoint then don’t worry about it. Dedicated capacity. You can see that it is grayed out. This is for power. Bi Premium. You might want to say I want a certain number of calls set up for this particular workspace developer template type. So that’s for sharing outside of your organization, this is one you may choose to use.

So the app is a published version of the workspace. So is it just that workspace admins can update the workspace? Or do you want to be able to delegate users who are contributors to be able to update the app as well? So I’ll check that, click Save, and there is our new workspace. So if you can go into workspaces we used to just see my workspace, but now we see my project. Zero, zero one. I can change which one I’m currently looking at by going to workspaces. And if I want to adjust any of the settings, I go to my workspace, I click dot and I go to Workspace settings and I can rechange anything that I previously had. I can also delete the workspace as well. You may notice that there are now three tabs at the top. So the dedicated capacity is now going to a tab of its own for premium users. And then if you’re using Azure Data Lake Gen Two storage account, then this can be configured, but that’s way outside the scope of this particular course. So this is how you create and configure a workspace.

2. Assign Workspace Roles

Well, now we have our new workspace project one workspaces that are designed for collaboration. We need some people, otherwise there’s not much point actually having a workspace. So let’s click on the next to the workspace and go to workspace access. So I’m set up as the admin, I’m the person who has set up the workspace. So we can add admins, members, contributors, in fact, we can also add viewers as well. So I’m going to add Jane as one. And as I just said, there are admins members, contributors and viewers. But what does that all mean? What is the difference between each one of them? Well, admins, well they’re just like me. What we have just done, we can update and delete the workspace. And of course we created the workspace in the first place.

We can add and remove people, including of admins. So be careful if you give us somebody an admin right for a second person, because they might remove you potentially from the admin. And you’ve got that checkbox right at the bottom to allow contributors to update the app for the workspace. So that’s an admin. So members can do the following and of course admins can do everything that members can do. They can add members but not administrators. They can publish an app, or change the permissions, or update an app, or share an item or an app, allow others to reshare the items and feature apps on colleagues homes. So it’s all about managing, adding members and updating apps.

Now, contributors, they can also update an app, but only if allowed. You saw that checkbox and you can feature dashboards and reports on colleagues’home and the rest of it is content. So create, edit and delete content in the workspace. So previously for members we were looking at apps, however, we can share them.

Contributors can actually do things with the content. They can publish reports, delete content, they can create a report based on a data set and they can copy a report. Now, if they’ve got permissions on the gateway we’ve had to look at gateway in a few videos ago and permissions for gateways are set up separately. You can schedule the data, refreshers and modify the gateway connection settings and then finally viewers. And of course contributors, members and admins can do everything that viewers can do, can view and interact with a license. But they will either need their own Power Pro Bi license there’s no such thing as a Power Pro Viewer license.

Alternatively, they could have a Power Pro free license if the workspace is in one of those really expensive Power Bi premiums. And they can also read data stored in workspace. Data flaws. What on earth are data flaws? We haven’t heard them about them before. So if I just click on Add and close, we can see this person has been added in this Project One workspace we have discover content exactly as we’ve had with Get Data we’ve had create nude content and we’ve got data flaws. And if you click on this, you get to this dialer box and this web page and you will see that data flaws are entities objects in the common data model using Azure data lake storage.

Gen two data lake storage is gen two especially is for big data. Now, this isn’t an Azure course like a Z 900. To know about data flaws really goes way beyond what we need to know in power Bi. So hopefully now you know roughly the difference between admin members, contributors and viewers. Admins can do anything including adding or removing people including of admins or deleting or update in the workspace. Members, they can add members and contributors and viewers. But equally important they can also update an app or share an item or share an app.

Contributors can update an app if allowed but they can also add, edit and delete and publish content. And viewers can view and interact with an item if they’ve got sufficient license. So to get into all of this, go to the workspace, click on the and go to workspace access. So if you just take a step back, admins, members, contributors, they are all read write roles, viewers are read only. Why is this important? If you go back a few videos we were talking about role level security.

Role level security is only enforced for members who are viewers. So if I put Susan as a viewer, anything that I share with her in this workspace which has role level security, susan will access according to the role level security, anything that Jane does because member is not just read but read write. She will have access to the full data set. So if you’re using OLS role level security make sure you put them as a viewer.

3. Providing Access to Datasets

So we have a new workspace and we’ve invited users to it, but it’s a bit empty. No dashboards, no reports, no data sets, no data sets. What I’m going to do is I’m going to get a data set from another workspace. So I’m going to go from the my workspace, so I’m going to go to datasets and there’s going to be a copy button about it somewhere. Create report, refresh now schedule refresh, view related, maybe it’s in the dot. No, that isn’t a copy. So what can we do? Well, you could always go to your Power Bi desktop and go to File publish, publish to Power Bi and you can republish it again to another destination, another workspace. But notice I was trying to copy dataset and it wasn’t happening. What if I copied a report? Is that possible? So let’s go back to a project One. You’ll see, you’ve got no dashboards, no reports and no data sets.

Now, I can’t copy dashboards either, so you can see no buttons there, probably because dashboards are related to reports, multiple reports, and you haven’t got all of these reports there. And also different people might want different things on the dashboard. However, we do have a copy for reports. So there it is, at the top of the right hand side, save a copy. So I’m going to call this no RLS One and I’m going to go to project one as my destination workspace, click save. Now, it looks like Microsoft have changed the way that data sets are copied or they’ve shown across workspaces. Here’s what I said back in September 2020, successfully saved. Let’s go into project one.

And notice now we’ve not only got a report, we’ve also got the data set. So when you copy the report, the data set comes with it. And so can I create a new report based on this data set? Definitely I can. However, just a few months later, microsoft seemed to have changed the functionality. It now says, you haven’t made a copy of the data set.

The data set still resides its original location, so this is how it’s now presented. So if I go into my workspace, you can see I’ve got nothing in Project One, no reports, no data sets, and if I create a copy of this report, so again, I’ll call it no RLS One, save it in Project One and save and switch to my workspace, project zero zero one. You can see that the report is there, but no data sets are shown. And if I go into the View lineage, you’ll see that we’ve got this report with a data set from another workspace.

So you can see that there’s a little couple of links. There’s a link between where I am, project zero zero one and the data set. So it’s not a copy, it’s just a link. Now, if you’re an administrator and you’re going, oh, hang on, I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want people to be able to copy reports and data sets across workspaces. You can stop it from happening by going to Settings admin portal, the tenant settings that’s organization, and look for the workspace settings. And here we have used data sets across workspaces so it’s currently enabled. So I can disable it or reenable it apart from specific security groups or for everybody except specific security groups.

Now, what is the effect of disabling this? Well, firstly, it takes about 15 minutes for it to really PhotoFO well, that copy reports across workspaces that we just did, that’s not available. If you are in a report based on a shared data set, then you won’t be able to edit the report. It won’t be suggesting any data sets which are outside of the ones that you actually have in the current workspace or where you are not a member. Basically, the data sets are siloed to ones that you have more active permission for.

Now, if you’re wondering, okay, how do I set up these specific security groups? How do we look at that when we were looking at endorsing data sets? So please go back a few videos and have a look at that. So in this video, we had a look at how to copy across reports from one workspace to another. You go to reports and you click Save a copy and a link to the data set goes along with it. Alternatively, you can just republish it from, say, Power Bi desktop.

4. Configure and Update a Workspace App

So workspaces are a good way to allow collaboration. Some people have got read write access for datasets, reports, dashboards, and some have just got read access. Now, it is largely used for developmental stages, not the finished product. When you want a finished product to be given out more generally, then this is is when you can use apps. So apps contain the same source of things, data types, reports and dashboards. However, it’s the presentation which is slightly different. So I’m back in home and I’ll go to my workspace and I’m just going to share a couple more objects into project One, and of course, any related objects that it needs. So I’ve shared this report. I’m now going into my report and I’m going to create a new dashboard. I’m going to pin some things. So this is the project one dashboard, and I’ll go into a never report and I’ll share this as well.

Just refresh the data. This data set dolphin has been refreshed. That’s okay. So I’ll just pin this. I’m just wanting some sample stuff. So here we have our new project dashboard. Now, if I go into the project One, I have some new things on the right hand side included in app. Now, this isn’t there for my workspace. There is no included in app, so you cannot start apps from my workspace. It’s got to be a different workspace. And so we got that in reports and we haven’t got that in data sets. But it should be obvious by now that if you are creating a report or sharing a report, then the data set will be included in whatever capacity is needed.

So I’m going to say, yes, I want both of these reports to be included in this app. In fact, I’m going to have a third report, which I’m not going to include. So let’s go to this one and copy that into there as well. So I’m not going to include this in the app, just so you can see that there is a difference between the workspace and the app. So, no thank you to that one, but I do want the dashboard. Now, what happens if you’ve got a dashboard that relies on a couple of reports, but you’re not going to be including both the reports where you get this message that says this report is used by one dashboard in the app. So what does that mean? It means that if you create the app, the dashboard will still be there, but it won’t include any tiles from this particular report.

So your choice then. At the top right, we have publishapp. So first of all, we want to give this app a name. So project one finished, for example. So we need a description, it’s useful in any way. This is project one in its final state, and if users need help, they can go to Microsoft. com and you can always upload a logo. Let’s have a color. I am going to choose a light blue color so you can see the light blue at the top. It’s useful to have different apps with different colors, so the end user can more easily distinguish which app they’re in. So contact information. So I’m going to show the publisher. So next tab, that’s the setup. Next tab is the navigation, so this is what they will see. And currently we have the dashboard followed by the reports. I’m going to add a new section. I’m going to say that this section is going to say dashboards, and I’ll move it up.

So you got these little things here. So this dashboard contains absolutely nothing at the moment. I can collapse it, I can expand it, but I want this project one to be in this dashboard. So I will put it in there by clicking on the report and going to which section I want. I’m going to have another section which is going to be called important reports. And I’m going to have no RLS one in there. And then you’ve probably guessed it an unimportant report and I’ll have no RLS two in there. Just to give an idea of what sort of things you can have, you can also hide a particular report from navigation. So if you did that well, there is a report link to get it directly and we can also have a new link. So support for support, click here. And again I’ll go to Microsoft. com, I’ll open it up in a new tab.

It could be in the content area, so the bit on the right hand side of all of this, or in the current tab, I’ll put it in the content area and I’ll have this in the unimportant report section. Then we have permissions so the entire organization or specific individuals or groups, so you can have up to 100 individuals, but you probably find them easier to be in a group and then you can just alter the groups as you want. So in the endorse, data sets, we had, for instance, new security groups set up, so I could be using that, but I’m going to have it with the entire organization.

Now, do you want people who have got access to the app to be able to connect to the app’s underlying data sets? So what that means is that users will be able to use these data sets and build their own reports and dashboards. So this is called the build permission. Do you want users to be able to make a copy of the reports in this app? Now, it should be pointed out that people who are going to have access to this app need to have power bi pro license. The only alternative is if this workspace is in a power bi premium workspace, in which case you don’t actually need the end user to have the pro license.

They could have a free license, but if they want to build to make a copy for instance of reports they will need a pro license. So all people you have an app, the app has to be in a premium workplace or the end user has to have a pro license. Do you want users to be able to share the app and the app’s underlying data set using the share permission? We’ll be careful. This is when things can get a bit out of control perhaps and you can see learn more about how to do this. Now you can also have the app to be installed on the end users automatically. It does take a bit of time, especially if you’ve got a lot of users to do this push installation.

You will need to have permission from the admin to be able to do this to start with. And you can see it’s not allowed by default. And let’s just note this thing at the top, some of the content in this app comes from data sets in other workplaces. So we’ve got this from the My workspace. You need to make sure by managing permissions manually to ensure that everyone who does have access has actually the access that they need. So that’s just a little additional thing when you are sharing data sets from other workplace spaces. So I’m going to publish the app. So when you publish an app that has a large distribution, might take a while, typically it’s five to ten minutes. So there is published. So you can either say here’s the link, so copy the link to Clipboard or it say go into Apps, get Apps. So let’s see what’s happened to Jane. So here is Jane and we can click on apps. So the workspaces she has access to are My Workspace and project One, because we shared it with her previously, that project zero zero one finished is not a workspace, it’s an app.

So it won’t be in the workspaces section. So click on Apps and it says you don’t have any but there is a link at the bottom get Apps. So I’ll get that and you can see there are a lot of apps, we have seen a fair number of these in the past. But at the top left we have project One finished. And this is an organizational app that previously that category was completely blank. So now I will get it now. And here we are. So these are my apps. So previously they said you have no app. So I’m going to have a look at my project One finished. So you can see the blue highlighting that we’ve got, we’ve gone into this Project One dashboard. We’ve got important reports, we’ve got unimportant reports. So I can click on each of these and we have got full support. Click here. And so I wanted it to be in this area.

But you notice that this particular webpage, Microsoft. com, it isn’t loading. So this is why I generally say I want it in a new tab anyway, if we go back to my main user, we go back in the workspace, project one as opposed to the project one finished. I can make any adjustments. For instance, maybe I don’t want this report to be shown now. Now it will still be there in everybody’s app. The workspace is a development staging area. Until you update the app, any changes you make will not be reflected in the app. So now if I click Update app, let’s put with one change in the description, leave everything else as it is. Obviously, if we get rid of the reports, we get rid of it in the navigation. Let’s update the app. There we go. Go back into Jane.

So I’ll go back into Home, go into the apps. We’ll see that even though I haven’t updated the app myself, it’s as Jane. That report has now gone. And finally, what I can also do, if I go back into my own user, I can also unpublish the app. So what this does is uninstalls the app for everybody who has got it installed. However, it doesn’t affect the workspace. So the contents of the workspace remains there, it just is the app which gets removed. Now, just a few points notes if you are already a workspace member. So if you are a member of the project, then you will automatically be given access to the app. As said, you’ve got a maximum of 100 users if you’re putting in individual users into your app, however, you can do groups and groups themselves. You can have up to 100 users or groups. So basically you only need one or two groups to have thousands of users.

 Apps can have a maximum of 200 dashboards. Again, probably not a huge problem there. And we don’t recommend having hundreds of apps where people don’t actually need them. So just keep the apps to whom they are necessary and update them whenever you want. So we’ve got workspaces for development purposes, apps for more closer to the finished product. So, in this video we have had a look at providing access to a workspace app. We have configured it, we’ve updated it, we’ve even removed it if you’ve if necessary. So they are a useful way of publishing your data to other people who have got this Power Bi Pro license in your tenant, in your organization, or if it is on a Power Bi Premium Workspace to anyone who has got a free license in your.

5. Publish, Import or Update Assets in a Workspace – Publish securely

Now that we’ve created an app, how can we say how good an app this is? You remember that a few videos ago we were able to promote or certify or endorse datasets. Well, as of around October 2020, power Bi now allows you to endorse apps and also individual reports as well. So let’s endorse this app. So I’m in in the workspace with the app and I’m going to endorse it. So let’s click on the dot dot in more options and endorse this app. So I can say I want this to be promoted or certified. And as before, when we were looking at promoting certifying data sets, you’ll need to have Certified enabled. So I’m just going to promote this, click Apply and there we go. So if we now go into the apps, you can see we’ve now got this little check mark next to this particular app. And we’re sorting by endorsement. So these endorsed apps call first. Now let’s go back to our standard workspace and I’m going to endorse this Get Data Import Report.

So I’m going to click on dot dot, and just to scroll along. By the way, if I just reduce the size of these columns, we’ll see endorsement. Here it isn’t endorsed. So click Dot, go to Settings, and here we can see at the moment it’s in Preview. So this is a trial that Microsoft is doing for this new feature to see whether people like it and if there’s any problems with it. So I’m going to promote this and click Save. So now you can see again the checkmark is there for promoted. So let’s change that to Certified. So now instead of a checkmark, we’ve got a little badge. So in addition to data sets, we can now endorse individual reports, say they’re promoted, say they’re certified, or after publishing an app, we can endorse the entirety of the app, not individual reports, but the app itself by going to and endorse.

6. Publish reports on the web, so the public can see

In this video we’ll be looking at publish, import or update assets in a workspace. While we’ve already done a huge amount of that, we’ve looked how we can publish assets into a workplace by going to for instance Power Bi desktop and going to publish to Power Bi. You’ll be then given the choice of what workspace you’re going to do. You’ve also also got a choice of copying. So we could go to any particular workspace and say this report, I want to copy it into another workspace. We can also get data which pulls in data from other data sets or publish data sets, including those which have been endorsed or certified or promoted by yourself or by somebody else in your organization. You can update assets. We’ve seen that you can just re import files or republish data. But there’s one other thing about publishing that I really want to mention and that is how to publish a report onto the internet. So let’s go to a report and we’ll go to this report here.

So I have the option if I go to the file of exporting it to PowerPoint, so I can export with the current values or the default values and I can do just one page or all the pages if this was a multipage report. So let’s go into a multi page report and we can see that we have got that option enabled. So export to PowerPoint, so let’s export. So I could highlight on a certain value for instance, and it will be given that filtering or highlighting in the PowerPoint report, as you can see it might take a few minutes. I can also export this report to a PDF file, so same sort of things.

So that is also being done. Here is the PDF so you can see how it is being presented. And here is the PowerPoint presentation. So we got three pages. The first page is an additional page with the last data refresh and download time at the bottom left and also a link to view it in Power Bi. Obviously you’d need to be logged in for that. And here is your presentation. But I can also embed in firstly SharePoint online if you got that, but also just on its standard website. So here is the content that I would need. So first of all, we’ve got a lot of jumbled letters up here. This is actually a link that we can use to embed the content.

So if I copy that I can go to my website. I’ve got a website here which is powered by WordPress. So I’m going to get to the visual editing and I’m just going to say this is my link and create a link and then paste it and click Add link. Now obviously this isn’t a course on using WordPress or any of a type of publishing software. So I’m just going to create a title here. So my Power Bi test page and I’m going to just publish this. So what you do in your own web environment might be different, but I can now view the page. So here’s the page. Here’s my link. Click on this. And here you can see my Power Bi report. Now, does this work in an incognito page? So let’s test this.

So there is my link. Click on it so you can see for this embedding, I do need to be logged in for the hyperlink to work. Now let’s have a look at the other thing that I can do. I can embed the report. So I’ll copy that. It’s a fairly long piece of text, but just based on what we’ve got previously. And I’ll go into my test page. I’ll edit it now. And this is HTML cord. So I’m going to say HTML code starts here. HTML code ends here. So this is my code and I’m going to go into the text editor. And instead of this is my code, I’m going to paste the code. Now obviously you don’t need this. HTML code starts here or ends here. This is just for demonstration purpose.

So I’m updating my web page and let’s view it. And here you can see my report. Wave pages one and two. Again, do I need to be logged in? So let’s add an incognito window so you can log in to view the report. So if I log in, for example, as Jane, so now we can see the report being generated. And again, if I use the link, I’ll be able to see the report. That’s okay if you want this to be a report that not everybody should see, that’s only people in your organization should see, and you want people to have to log in. In the next video, we’ll look at how to create a public report where you don’t have to sign in.