Power BI Viewer Role Released

August 05, 2019

Power BI administrators and content producers have been asking for a ‘View Only’ role for Power BI Users. Microsoft recently announced a new Viewer role in Power BI. This gives administrators the ability to share dashboards, reports and data in a view-only mode. This allows for easier access to the front-end, but restricts the ability to access the datasets and dataflow or edit content in the workspace. 

In most organizations, there is a team responsible for governing the data. A majority of the data consumers today do not desire the need for development functionality within Power BI nor does the team want to give them open access to changing their data structure. This new role allows for a developer or analyst to build a report and then publish it for consumption in a ‘View Only’ role to ensure the data integrity.

Row-level security is still enforced and workspaces can be setup in a read only permission. Row level security can restrict access to data to Power BI Users in a user by user basis. For example, schools can setup different views for administration, principals, teachers and even students. A teacher would only be able to see their class, a principal can see the entire school, and administration can see all schools within the district.

Licensing requirements are a bit different. If the workspace leverages Power BI Premium, the user assigned to a Viewer role does not require a Power BI Pro license to view the content in the workspace. This has the potential to reduce your licensing costs.

Now, think about how this could be leveraged within your organization. Power BI is adding features every month.

We are in a golden age for visualizing data.

 

Ed Montano
About the Author

Ed Montano
Data Analyst Developer 

Ed has been working data visualization for 15 years with a background in Geography/GIS healthcare and market analysis.  Ed transforms data into actionable information to tell a story with data.  He now uses Power BI to access elaborate data for his customers.

Share

Title Text

Subtitle Text