9.1 Understanding Workspaces and Groups
9.1.3 Working with Group and Workspaces
We’re back to Martin, a data analyst from Adventure Works. Martin approached Elena, who oversees data analytics, to help him set up a workspace for the Sales Department.
This workspace will be accessed only by members of his unit and, it’ll contain BI content produced by Martin and his colleagues.
NOTE Unless IT has disabled Office 365 group creation, currently there’s nothing stopping Martin from creating a group on his own (if he has a Power BI Pro subscription) and becoming the new group’s admin. However, I do believe that someone needs to coordinate groups and workspaces, because creating groups indiscriminately could quickly become as useful as having no groups at all. It would be impossible for IT to maintain security over groups they didn’t know existed.
Creating a group
As a first step, you need to create a Sales Department group:
1.Open your web browser and navigate to http://powerbi.com. Log in to Power BI Service.
2.In the left navigation bar, expand My Workspace.
3.Click the plus (+) sign next to the Group Workspaces section.
4.In the “Create a Group” window, enter Sales Department as a group name.
5.In the “Add group members” field, enter the email addresses of some of your coworkers, or leave the field blank for now. You don’t have to add your email because your
membership is applied when you create the group, and you’ll be the group admin.
6.Click Save to create the group.
In the navigation bar, the Group Workspaces section now includes the Sales Department workspace.
Uploading content
As you create a group, Power BI opens a “Welcome to the Sales Department group” page so that you can start adding content immediately. Let’s add the Adventure Works model (that you previously created) to the Sales Department workspace:
Figure 9.6 This page allows you to add content to a workspace.
1. In the welcome page, click the Get button in the Files section (Figure 9.6). If you close your web browser and go back to Power BI, make sure that you expand My Workspace and select Sales Department so that content is added to this workspace and not to your personal workspace.
1.In the Files page, click Local File.
2.Navigate to the Adventure Works.pbix file you worked on in the previous part of the book, and upload it in Power BI.
3.Using your knowledge from reading this book, view and edit the existing reports, and create some new reports and dashboards. For example, open the Adventure Works.pbix dashboard. Click the Adventure Works.pbix tile to navigate to the underlying report, and then pin some tiles to the dashboard. Back to the dashboard, delete the Adventure
Works.pbix tile, and rename the dashboard to Adventure Works Sales Dashboard.
Scheduling data refresh
Once you’ve uploaded the Adventure Works model, you might want to schedule an automatic data refresh. As a prerequisite, you need to install and configure the Power Personal BI Gateway:
NOTE As its name suggest, the Personal Power BI Gateway is for your personal use. You can install it on your
computer or another machine that has access to the data source you want to refresh the data from. Each personal gateway installation is tied to the user who installs it and it can’t be shared with other users. By contrast, the Enterprise Gateway (discussed in section 9.3) allows IT to centralize and manage access to on-premises data. However, currently the Enterprise Gateway doesn’t support refreshing data so you’ll use the Personal Gateway.
1. From the Power BI portal, expand the Downloads menu in the top-right corner, and click “Power BI Gateways”. In the next page, click the Download button below the “For personal Use” section.
1.Once the setup program starts, follow the steps to install the gateway. When the gateway is installed, a configuration utility pops up. It asks you to specify what Windows account the gateway will run under. By default, it’ll use your account so that it can access the data sources on your behalf. The configuration utility will ask you to enter your Windows password. Remember that if your password expires, you’ll need to reconfigure the
gateway. To do so, click the Power BI Personal Gateway icon in the Windows taskbar or open the application with the same name.
NOTE Depending on the account permissions (admin versus regular user), the Personal Gateway installs either as a service or as an application. If you have administrator access to your computer, it will install as a service (Data
Management Gateway Service) and run unattended, even if you log out of the computer. If you change your password, you need to update the service password as well. If you don’t have administrator rights, the gateway will run as an application using your current account and password, but you need to be logged in. For more information about these setup scenarios, read the “Power BI Personal Gateway” topic in the Power BI documentation at
https://support.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/649846-power-bi-personal-gateway.
2.Back in Power BI Service, click the ellipsis (…) button next to the Adventure Works dataset. In the properties window, click Schedule Refresh to open the Settings page.
3.In the Settings page (Datasets tab), expand the Data Source Credentials section, which should look like the one shown in Figure 9.7.
Figure 9.7 The data settings page allows you to configure data refresh.
4.The Gateway Status should show that the personal gateway is online on the computer where it’s installed.
5.The “Data Source Credentials” section shows that the credentials are incorrect. Although this might look alarming, it’s easy to fix, and you only need to do it once per data source.
Power BI simply requires you to restate how you want to connect to the data source.
Click the “Edit Credentials” link for each data source, specify Windows authentication as the authentication method, and then click the Sign In button (see Figure 9.8).
Figure 9.8 The first time you configure scheduled data refresh, you need to reset the authentication method.
6. (Optional) Specify a schedule interval. Back in the Datasets tab of the Settings page (see Figure 9.7 again), expand the Schedule Refresh section, and update your settings, such as turning on the refresh, refresh frequency, your time zone, time of the refresh, and whether you want refresh failure email notifications. When you’re finished, click Apply.
Now the Adventure Works is scheduled for an automatic refresh. When the schedule is up, Power BI will connect to the Personal Gateway, which in turn will to connect to all the data sources in the model and will reload the data. Currently, there isn’t an option to refresh specific data sources or to specify data source-specific schedules. Once a model is enabled for refresh, Power BI will refresh all the data on the same schedule.
7.(Optional) If another member in your group has scheduled a dataset refresh, go to the dataset Settings page and discover how you can take over the data refresh when you need to. Once you take over, you can overwrite the data source and the schedule settings.