Application workspaces

Application workspaces are containers in the Power BI service of related content (reports and dashboards). As a Power BI Pro feature as discussed in the Power BI licenses section of Chapter 1, Planning Power BI Projects, members of application workspaces, are able to create and test content, such as new dashboards and changes to reports, without impacting the content being accessed by users outside of the workspace. Once the new or revised content in the workspace is determined to be ready for consumption, the workspace can be published or updated as a Power BI app, as described in Chapter 11, Creating Power BI Apps and Content Distribution.

"We intend workspaces just for creation...it's the place where content gets created in Power BI."

– Ajay Anandan, Senior Program Manager.

In addition to the default isolation or staging between content creation (workspaces) and content consumption (apps), BI teams can utilize multiple app workspaces to stage their deployments as per the Staged deployments section later in this chapter. For example, reports and dashboards can be initially created in a development workspace, evaluated against requirements in a test workspace, and finally deployed to a production workspace. The production app workspace would support the app which large numbers of business users would access and therefore could be assigned to Power BI Premium capacity to provide dependable performance and the flexibility to scale resources according to the needs of the workload.

Chapter 13, Scaling with Premium and Analysis Services, provides details on the features and benefits of Power BI Premium. These include the cost advantage of capacity-based pricing versus per-user licensing in large-scale deployments, managing Premium capacities (hardware), such as scaling up or out, and assigning workspaces to Premium capacities. Additional capabilities exclusive to content stored in Premium capacity, such as incremental data refresh, larger Power BI datasets, and more frequent scheduled data refreshes (for example, every 30 minutes), are also described in Chapter 13, Scaling with Premium and Analysis Services.

The following diagram and four-step process depicts the essential role of app workspaces in the life cycle of Power BI content:

App workspaces and apps

A Power BI Pro user creates an App Workspace and adds other Power BI Pro users as members with edit rights
The members of the App Workspace publish reports to the workspace and create dashboards in the workspace
All content or a subset of the content in the App Workspace is published as a Power BI app
Users or groups of users access content in the published app from any device

All users within the app workspace will need a Power BI Pro license. All users consuming the published Power BI app will also need a Power BI Pro license, unless the app workspace has been assigned to Power BI Premium capacity. If the app workspace has been assigned to Power BI Premium capacity, users with Power BI (free) licenses and, optionally, external guest users from outside the organization with free licenses, can read or consume the Power BI app. As described in Chapter 13, Scaling with Premium and Analysis Services, it is, of course, necessary to provision the appropriate resources (for example, CPU cores and RAM) to support the workload generated by the Power BI app.

In small team scenarios (5–15 users) in which maximum self-service flexibility is needed, all users can be assigned Pro licenses and collaborate on content within the app workspace. This approach negates the isolation benefit of workspaces from apps but provides immediate visibility to the latest versions of the content. Additionally, Power BI Pro users within the workspace can create their own Power BI and Excel reports based on connections to the published dataset in the workspace.

Table of Contents for Application workspaces

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Table of Contents for
Application workspaces