Power BI Service is great for collaboration and sharing. In this article, you will learn about some features of workspaces, apps, publish-to-web, and usage reports related to sharing and collaboration within Power BI Service.
User Roles
Previously, Power BI service just had two major user roles: the edit and view roles. Roles let you manage who can do what in a workspace, so teams can collaborate. There are four major user roles within the workspace in Power BI Service which are Admin, Member, Contributor, and Viewer roles.
Viewer Role
The is role mainly for viewing purposes. It’s like read-only access to the content. A user with this role can view a report or dashboard in a workspace and can also interact with visuals. With this role, cannot add or remove users. Cannot use Analyze in Excel option on reports or have a connection to the datasets or dataflow. Unless given Build permission. Ideal for stakeholders/end users.
Contributor
Users with this role can create, edit, delete, copy, and publish content and reports within a workspace i.e. access all workspace objects: reports, dashboard, workbook, dataset, and dataflow. However, they cannot publish, update, or edit an app in a workspace unless given this ability by users with admin or member roles. They cannot add or remove users. They can modify Gateway and schedule data refreshes. The Contributor role is the ideal role for Power BI developers.
Member
The member role allows gives access to users to publish the content of a workspace as an App for the end-users. They have all the privileges of the viewer and contributor role. They can also set access for other member roles and below.
Admin
The admin role has full access to the workspace. The admin can also update or delete the workspace in addition to performing all of the Member’s role actions. They can also add or remove additional Admins from the workspace.
Power BI Apps
Power BI Apps is another great feature for sharing content in Power BI service. It can be used to share a subset of your workspace content with specific users. For example, if you have about 10 reports in a certain workspace and not all are ready for consumption, you can create an app to share the completed ones with stakeholders this way, they don’t have access to reports still in the pipeline.
Power BI Apps as a method of sharing content is more efficient than giving the viewer role access to users within a workspace. With this method, you can share content with users without having to worry about making changes to the report datasets or the report itself. You can learn more about Power BI Apps Here.
Publish to Web
Publish to the web is the only free method of sharing Power BI content. This method doesn’t have any security bound to it. As soon as you publish a report to the web, anyone with that link can access the report and the data without the need to sign in. This method of sharing is easy. However, it is not recommended for sensitive data.
To publish a report to the web, you need to follow these simple steps.
- Open the PowerBI report you desire to publish.
- Click on File > Embed report > Publish to web (public)
- Click on Create embed code below. This would create a link and embed a code for you to share with the public either through a website (HTML) or an email.
- Your report is ready to be shared. You can either copy the link and share it as an email or copy the html URL and embed it in a website or simply copy the URL and paste it into your browser, and you will have access to the report.
Deleting a publish to web link.
Once you have created a publish to the web link, you can delete it, i.e. render the link unusable by following these quick steps.
- Open the workspace where the report is located and navigate to the menu icon at the top right corner of your screen and select Settings > Manage embed code.
- Here you can either get the code or delete it if you no longer need to publish publicly.
Usage Metrics
Ever wondered how often a certain report is used? Usage metrics in Power BI is an inbuilt analytics function that helps indicate if a significant portion of the organization uses one of your reports daily, or if a dashboard you created isn’t being used at all. Note that usage metrics reports can only be used in Power BI service. Only users who have edit access to a report and a Pro or Premium license can access usage metrics.
Viewing Usage Metrics
- Navigate to the workspace where the report resides.
- Select the menu option and select View usage metrics report.
- The usage metrics will be created for you.
- To view the result, click on view usage report.
- You can toggle to view the new usage report. This gives a more modern look and it contains more pages of the analysis. The performance page is interesting as it shows how fast a report loads for your users.
The reports list page ranks the reports against each other based on views, unique users, and days. With this report, you can slice and dice through the data to see what pages most viewed or what user(s) are is frequent utilizers. It also shows the ranking of the report against the total number of reports within the org. This report gives a 90-day span.
Customizing your Usage Metric Report
You can customize your usage metric report by redesigning it in Power BI desktop, you can get data in a similar manner to shared datasets. To do this, navigate to data hub and select Power BI datasets, a window will appear where you can select the usage report you created earlier.
You have to be aware of the right workspace where your report resides. With this, you have access to the datasets, measures, columns, and calculations, and use it to create your report.
Summary
In this article, we explained the use of workspaces and user roles within workspaces, Power BI Apps, and publish-to-web as some of the methods of sharing reports in Power BI service. Power BI Apps are ideal for sharing with users since they separate the user environment from the dev environment. It also provides a more cost-effective licensing option in some scenarios. Publish-to-web option is a wise option if you want to share some public reports on your company’s public website. Usage metrics report is great for measuring the adoption of your reports within the organization.