9.2 Packaging and Publishing Content
9.2.1 Understanding Organizational Content Packs
In Chapter 2, I explained that Power BI comes with content packs that allow your
information workers to connect to a variety of online services, such as Google Analytics, Dynamics CRM, QuickBooks, and many more. Microsoft and its partners provide these content packs to help you analyze data from popular cloud services. Not only do content packs allow you to connect easily to external data, but they also include prepackaged reports and dashboards that you can start using immediately! Similar to Power BI content packs, organizational content packs let data analysts and IT/BI pros package and distribute BI content within their organization.
What’s an organizational content pack?
An organizational content pack is a way for any company to distribute Power BI content to anyone who’s interested in it. A content pack includes specific dashboards, reports, and datasets. Packaging an item publishes dependent items as well, so that the dependencies are included and the package content is functional.
For example, if you publish a dashboard, the content pack will also include the
dependent reports and datasets. And if you publish a report, the content pack will include the report dataset. You create a content pack from the Power BI Settings ð Create Content Pack menu. Use the “Create Content Pack” to specify which items you want to publish from the workspace you selected.
For example, if you’re in your private workspace (My Workspace), you can publish any dashboard, report, or dataset that exists there. However, if you select the Sales Department workspace, you can only publish content from that workspace. Because I was in the Sales Department workspace before creating the content pack the Create Content (see Figure 9.9), the page limits me to choose items from this workspace only.
Figure 9.9 An organizational content pack can include dashboards, reports, and dataset references.
I’ve checked the Adventure Works report. The content pack will automatically include the Adventure Works dataset because that’s the dataset that this report uses. If I’ve decided to publish the Adventure Works dashboard that uses the Adventure Works report, the content pack will include that report and the Adventure Works dataset. If I decide to publish only the datasets, users won’t get access to my reports but they can create their own reports from these datasets.
An organizational content pack packages links to the original content that you publish.
Going back to the example, the consumers of my content pack will gain read-only access by default to the Adventure Works report and its dataset. But what if they want to make
changes?
Understanding content access
In the process of creating an organizational content pack, you specify which users will have access to it. You can publish the content pack to the entire organization or restrict it to specific Power BI, Azure Active Directory, or Exchange distribution groups. Note that you can only publish to groups and not to individuals. As shown back in Figure 9.9, I’ve decided to publish the “Adventure Works Sales” content pack to the Sales Department and Finance groups, and I entered their email aliases in the top field.
NOTE The Power BI portal doesn’t show the email group alias of a Power BI/Office 365 group. You can use the Admin section of Office 365 to find the email associated with a group.
Any Power BI Pro user can create an organizational content pack. The content pack author can view and manage the content packs he published by going to the “Power BI Settings”
ð “View Content Pack” menu. This opens a page that shows the content packs you published for the active workspace. For example, if you have selected the Sales Department workspace, you’ll see the content packs you’ve published from that
workspace (see Figure 9.10). The Edit link sends you to the “Update Content Pack” page, which is similar to the “Create Content Package” page. You can click the Delete link to delete a content pack.
Figure 9.10 Click Power BI Settings ð View Content Pack to view and manage the content packs that you’ve published.
On the consumer side of things, any Power BI Pro user can consume a content pack. If the content pack is restricted to specific groups, the user must be a member of one or more of these groups. By default, consumers get read-only access to the content. However, a
consumer can customize the included dashboards and reports without affecting other users and the original content. When a consumer indicates that he wants to change a BI artifact that’s included in a content pack, Power BI creates a copy of the content pack. This copies the original report or dashboard. However, consumers can never modify datasets or
change the dataset refresh settings. Only the content pack author can make dataset
changes.
Understanding data security
Content pack data security is similar to workspace data security. If Elena creates and publishes the Adventure Works self-service model created by Martin, every consumer of the content pack will have access to all the data that Martin imported. In other words, Martin and the content pack consumers have the same access to the content pack data. If Martin has scheduled the Adventure Works model for data refresh, the consumers will also see the new data.
What if you want consumers to have different access rights to the data? For example, you might want Martin to have unrestricted access but want Maya to see data for only a subset of your customers. Currently, the only way to address this requirement is to implement an Analysis Services model that applies data security, based on the user identity. In Power BI, you need to create a dataset that connects live to the Analysis
Services model. You can create this dataset by using Get Data in the Power BI Portal or by using Power BI Desktop and publishing the model to Power BI Service. Now when Maya uses the content pack, her identity will be passed to Analysis Services, and she’ll get restricted access depending on how the SSAS security is set up. I’ll discuss this scenario in more detail in the next chapter.
Understanding the Content Gallery
The Power BI Content Gallery allows users to discover and consume organizational content packs. You can access the Content Gallery from the Get Data ð My Organization section. The Content Gallery shows the organizational content packs and allows users to search on the content pack name and description. Users can only see content packs that they have permissions to access, via their group membership.
Figure 9.11 shows that the user has permissions to use two content packs. When the user selects a content pack, a popup section is displayed with more information about the content pack, including the author, the created date, and the description. Once the user connects to the pack, the user can access its content.
Figure 9.11 The Power BI Content Library allows consumers to discover and use content packs.