How to organize workspaces in a Power BI environment

The question I often get in my Power BI architecture consulting sessions is that; “How should we organize our workspaces? should we have one workspace with all the reports in it? or multiple? should we split it based on each report? business unit? or something else?” In this article and video, I’ll explain a guide of how to organize and setup workspaces in your organization.
Read my blog article here:

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[artemburov]

Thanks for the video! Simple and clear explanation. My mistake was considering this topic as not worth paying too much attention to. Indeed it really requires a lot of thinking to organize workspaces properly.

[mbujtor]

Thanks for sharing, now I know that we are on the right path :)
We separate workspaces by business units, B2B user types, dev pipeline... and also having RLS implemented in some cases.

[andykebede]

You are very interesting the topic you comes up every times.

[kostaskolotouros]

Very interesting topic and clearly described. Thank you!

[armandeidi]

Thanks for sharing Reza,
Imagine you have 20 folders in PowerBI Server with average of 10 dashboards in each, you have 3 separate servers (Dev, UAT and Prod). How would you organise these dashboards in PowerBI Service?
One scenario is to have 20 workspaces and two extra workspace used as Development and Test. Then you would lose the ability to use Deployment pipelines.

[CHQAQC]

Thanks for the video @RADACAD ! Great insights as always.

So I have a follow up question. What is the best practice to use when you have workspaces set up for different functional areas (e.g. Sales, HR, Project, Maintenance, Production) but want to create a crossfunctional (e.g. site management) dashboard or app with chart & KPIs based on content from the different functional Power BI reports.

[nicolinadicaprio]

Do you have any recommendation on how to organize a Premium Capacity. Is it possible creating folders to organize the reports per argument?

[DanielWeikert]

What if I like to share a dataset to report creators but the dataset itself should have security build in so that already the creators who use the dataset (single source of truth) can only work with their limited access to the dataset (kind of subdataset) and not see everything? Thnanks

[lakeoffm]

Hi! We're struggling with the point where several reports need to be shared between multiple otherwise separate groups of users (different workspaces). What would be the best way to share the reports? Will it be to manually publish a report to each of the workspaces? Or use the Copy report function from the service? Or smith else?

[neovoxnyc]

Hello Reza,
Nice Video. I am building a new Power BI environment and plan on having 3 SQL servers as the main data sources (Dev, UAT, Prod). Right now we are going to use Power Bi Pro and then later scale up to Premium capacity, If I use 3 workspaces as you suggest (Dev, Test, Prod) in the Power BI Service, can I manually change the data sources for reports as I push them from Dev to UAT to Prod to the related SQL Server? I know I will be able to do this automatically with deployment pipelines at some point, but any risks trying to do this manually for now?
Thanks for any insight.

[andykebede]

DO you have a blog or any that shows how can combine multiple workspace in to one.

[mgandulfo]

Thanks for this video. If you use cascading layers and, let's say, I want to query a table that is 3 layers down, wouldn't that mean that my report sends a query to the outer layer and that one to the next layer and so on? Wouldn't that create inefficiency and higher latency?

[kyasoubi]

Very interesting topic. if we sharing the related dashboard ( lets say financial dashboards) for different users using row level security does it have to be in a different workspace?
Many thanks in advance

[YTEEsenior]

Can you cascade dataflow auto refresh from linked workspaces?

[jacobm]

how can we migrate / move dashboards from Premium to another Premium workspace ?

[visheshjjain]

Hello Reza,
I have multiple clients and I am creating / managing all of their reports under my tenant.
I am separating each client by using a different workspace. I have turned off 'Sharing dataset between workspaces'.
Could you please provide more information, if there is anything I am missing or should implement.
Thank you!

[gabriellegall]

Why do we need layers ? I could just put all my Dataflows into one workspace

[peco]

A good video but the use case scenarios you dismissed do have merit where you have potentially hundreds of external access groups. Say analytical reports for customers as opposed to internal consumers.