The members added to the workspace are most commonly report authors who will connect to dataset(s) to develop reports in Power BI Desktop. These reports can then be published back to the app workspace and their visuals can be pinned to dashboards in the Power BI service as per the previous Chapter 7, Designing Power BI Dashboards and Architectures.

Since app workspaces have a one-to-one relationship with Power BI apps, workspace administrators are often familiar with the users or groups of users who will consume the content as well as other subject matter experts, such as the dataset designer described in the Project roles section of Chapter 1, Planning Power BI Projects.

In the following screenshot, Jennifer has created an app workspace and added Mark as a member with edit rights:

The Edit workspace dialog is exclusive to workspace admins. In this example, Mark's edit rights as a member may be sufficient or Jennifer can revise Mark's role from Member to Admin so that he can also add other members. A security group in Azure Active Directory cannot be used to add members to a workspace. However, security groups can be referenced when publishing an app workspace as a Power BI app to enable groups of users to view the content of the workspace.

Users with Power BI free licenses can technically be added to app workspaces via the Edit workspace dialog. The free user will see the name of the app workspace in the Power BI service but the following dialog will be prompted when trying to access the workspace:

The preceding dialog is also prompted to free users when trying to utilize other Power BI Pro features, such as sharing a dashboard, accessing a shared dashboard from shared (non-Premium) capacity, or creating an email subscription to a report or dashboard.