Power BI Sharing is Getting Better 2
We had to wait four years but here they are: Power BI shared datasets are here. This makes it a good time to revisit the remaining Power BI sharing limitations, which I listed in my previous blog on the same subject.
- No nesting support – Workspaces can’t be nested, such as to have a global Sales workspace that breaks down to Sales North America, Sales Europe, etc. You can’t organize content hierarchically and there is no security inheritance. Consequently, you must resort to a flattened list of workspaces. Microsoft has hinted about subfolders, but no further details are provided about how they will work and ETA.
- UPDATE 6/27: The new Viewer role supports sharing with viewers.
Sharing with “viewers” – You can’t just add Power BI Free users to share content in a premium workspace. This would have been too simple. Instead, you must share content out with either individual reports/dashboards or apps. A Viewer role has been in the works to address this, but no official release date yet. - One-to-one relationship with apps – Since for some obscure reason that only Microsoft knows, broader sharing requires apps, an app needs to be created (yet another sharing layer) to share workspace content to a broader audience. But you can’t publish multiple apps from a workspace, such as to share some reports with one group of users and another set with a different group. Hopefully, the forthcoming Viewer role will remove this limitation and de-emphasize apps, which in my opinion add unnecessary complexity without bringing much business value.
It’s nice to share and it’s good to see that Power BI is making it simpler but more is needed to bring sharing to where it should be.
