Sharing a Power BI report sounds like it should be simple. You build the report, you publish it to a workspace, and then you give your end users access. Done, right? Well, that is exactly where most organizations get it wrong. The way many teams give access to their business users is one of the biggest mistakes I see in real-world Power BI implementations. It causes maintenance headaches, breaks the separation between development and production, and exposes work-in-progress content to people who should never see it.
Watch the Video
📺 YouTube:
Jump to a section in the video:
- 0:00 — Introduction
- 0:50 — What this video is about
- 1:31 — The most common mistake when sharing Power BI content
- 2:04 — What a workspace actually is (and who it is for)
- 2:45 — Mistake #1: Giving users Admin / Member / Contributor access
- 4:04 — Mistake #2: Giving users Viewer access on the workspace
- 4:26 — Why Viewer access on the workspace is a problem
- 5:28 — The work-in-progress problem with Viewer access
- 6:01 — Mistake #3: Per-report Manage Permissions sharing
- 7:00 — The right way to share: Power BI App
- 7:56 — How the Power BI App works (audiences, navigation, content)
- 10:10 — The new Org App (Organization App)
- 12:09 — When workspace Viewer access is OK (test users only)
- 13:03 — Wrap-up
In this article, I want to walk you through the most common mistakes people make when sharing Power BI reports from a workspace, explain why they are mistakes, and then show you the right way to do it. Let’s go and check it out.
What Is a Workspace, and Who Is It For?
🎥 See this in the video: 2:04 — What a workspace actually is
Before we talk about the mistakes, let’s get one thing straight.
A workspace in Power BI (and Microsoft Fabric) is an environment where you can hold a group of related items — reports, semantic models, paginated reports, dashboards, dataflows, and so on — all together in one place. It is the place where the BI team and developers collaborate, build, and iterate on content.
A workspace is not an environment for end users. It is an environment for developers.
This is the single most important sentence in this whole article. If you think of a workspace as the place where your end users will go to consume reports, you have already started down the wrong path. The workspace is your team’s development area. It is where things change, where things break temporarily, and where work in progress lives. End users have no business being there.
If you want to learn more about the workspace itself, I have a dedicated article that explains it in detail: Power BI Workspace; Collaborative DEV Environment.
Mistake #1: Giving End Users Admin, Member, or Contributor Access on the Workspace
🎥 See this in the video: 2:45 — Adding users with edit-level roles
Let’s see this in action. When you go to a workspace and click on Manage Access, you can add users (or, even better, security groups) and assign them one of four roles: Admin, Member, Contributor, or Viewer.
Admin, Member, and Contributor all give the user the ability to edit the content within the workspace. So this one is pretty obvious — you don’t want your end users to be able to change the report you have built and break it. Most people understand this. They wouldn’t give a business user Contributor access because the user could accidentally (or intentionally) modify or delete a report.
If you want to understand the differences between these three edit-level roles in detail, read Best Practice for Power BI Workspace Roles Setup.
So far so good. Where it goes wrong is the next mistake.
Mistake #2: Giving End Users the Viewer Role on the Workspace
🎥 See this in the video: 4:04 — The Viewer access mistake
This is the biggest and most common mistake I see in Power BI implementations.
People look at the four roles and they say: “Well, the Viewer can’t change anything, so it’s safe. I’ll give my end users Viewer access on the workspace.”
It sounds reasonable. It feels safe. But it is wrong. Here is why.
Why Viewer Access on the Workspace Is a Mistake
The workspace is your development area. You and the rest of the BI team are continuously changing the reports — fixing visuals, adding measures, tweaking the semantic model, publishing new versions multiple times per day. If a user has Viewer access on the workspace, they get impacted by every single change immediately. The moment you publish a half-finished version, the user sees it.
Normally that is not what you want. Normally, you want a clear separation between your development environment and your user environment. The user should see a stable, finished, blessed version of the report — not whatever you happened to publish 10 minutes ago.
Workspace Viewer is not a sharing mechanism. It is a developer-side preview role.
There is also a second problem with Viewer access. Imagine I have 10 reports in my workspace. Five of them are ready for the user, and five of them are work in progress. When I add a user as Viewer to the workspace, I am giving them view access to everything consumable in that workspace — all 10 reports, all dashboards, all paginated reports. There is no way to say “this user can see these five but not the other five.” Workspace-level Viewer is all or nothing.
This is exactly the same issue I have explained in the workspace roles article — many organizations use the Viewer role for end users, and it is a big mistake because it gives the end user access to content in the developer environment, which changes constantly.
Mistake #3: Sharing Each Report Individually With “Manage Permissions”
🎥 See this in the video: 6:01 — Manage Permissions on individual reports
Some people, after realizing that workspace-level Viewer access is too broad, go in another wrong direction. They go to each report individually, click on Manage Permissions, and add users one report at a time. They might also use the Direct Access tab to assign Build access if they want the user to create reports on top of the semantic model.
People often think this is a good way because at least it gives them per-report control. It is not a good way either.
Why Per-Report Sharing Doesn’t Scale
The problem is maintenance. With this approach, every time you need to manage security or change access — adding a user, removing a user, changing what someone can see — you have to go to every individual report and dashboard and manage that. If you have 10 reports and 50 users in different access combinations, you are going to spend half your week updating permissions one report at a time.
Per-item sharing is a lot of work, and it makes your security model fragmented and impossible to audit. It is the kind of thing that looks fine on day one and becomes a nightmare by month six.
For more on per-item sharing and its limitations, see Dashboard Sharing and Manage Permissions in Power BI; Simple, but Useful?.
It is also worth remembering that Build access (which often comes up in this conversation) is different from Edit access. If you want to understand that distinction, read Power BI User Access Levels: Build and Edit are different.
So, What Is the Right Way to Share Power BI Reports From a Workspace?
Now that we have covered what not to do, let’s talk about the right approach. There are two solutions, and which one you use depends on your licensing and what features you have access to.
Solution 1: Power BI App (Workspace App)
🎥 See this in the video: 7:00 — The Power BI App as the right approach
If you are using a Power BI Pro license, the Power BI App — also called the workspace app — is the production-ready way to share content with end users. It is generally available regardless of whether you are on Power BI Pro or Premium, and it is the solution we use for most of our customers at RADACAD.
Here is how it works. Instead of giving users access to your workspace, you create an app on top of the workspace. The app is a curated, separate environment where you choose:
- Which content to include. If you have 10 reports in the workspace but only 3 are ready for users, you publish only those 3 in the app.
- A clean navigation menu. You can organize content into sections, add custom links, and design the look and feel.
- Audiences. This is one of the best features of the app. You can define multiple audience groups within the same app and give each audience a different view. For example, one audience sees everything, another audience sees only Sydney data, another audience sees only Auckland data. Same app, multiple views, central management.
Once the app is published, the end user sees a stable view. If a developer changes a report in the workspace, that change does not flow into the app until you republish it. (There are some exceptions — for example, changes in the semantic model do impact the app because the model is shared. But report-level changes don’t propagate until you decide to publish them.)
This gives you exactly what you want: a developer environment (the workspace) and a user environment (the app), cleanly separated, with one central security model.
If you want a deep dive on this method, read Ultimate Sharing Strategy: Power BI Apps.
Solution 2: Org App (Organization App)
🎥 See this in the video: 10:10 — The new Org App
The other option is newer. It is called the Org App (Organization App), and at the time of writing it is in preview. The Org App is part of the Microsoft Fabric experience, but it is also available for Power BI Pro workspaces, so even if your workspace is on a Pro license you can still use it.
The way it works is a bit different from the workspace app. Instead of publishing the entire workspace as an app, you create an Org App as an item inside the workspace. You can create many Org Apps within the same workspace — I already have three in mine. Each Org App has its own content selection, sections, links, look and feel, and sharing settings.
After saving the Org App, you share it with users. You can give specific groups of people access, and you can share a direct link.
Org App is most likely going to be the future direction of Power BI sharing. It gives you more flexibility because you can have multiple Org Apps per workspace, where with the workspace app you have only one app per workspace.
Org App vs. Workspace App: Which One Should You Use?
Both are correct ways to share content. Both give you the developer/user environment separation you need. The workspace app is mature, generally available, and battle-tested. The Org App is newer, still in preview at the time of this video, but more flexible and likely the future direction.
What matters most is that you use one of them — not workspace Viewer access, and not per-item Manage Permissions sharing.
What About Test Users? Is Workspace Viewer Ever OK?
🎥 See this in the video: 12:09 — The exception for test users
Yes, there is one legitimate use case for Viewer access on the workspace.
Sometimes you have test users who need to see exactly what you are working on right now, before you republish the app. You don’t always have time to republish the app every time you make a small change. In that case, giving them Viewer access on the workspace for a short period of time is fine.
But this is the exception, not the rule. It is not recommended to use Viewer-level access on the workspace as the standard way of sharing with end users. Use it sparingly, for a small number of test users, and only for short windows.
For everyone else — the actual business users who consume the reports — use the app.
Multiple Workspaces (Dev / Test / Prod) — Does That Help?
Some organizations try to solve the development/user separation problem by creating separate workspaces — one for Dev, one for Test, one for Prod — and giving Viewer access on the Prod workspace. This can work, but it has its own issues. You still have the “all or nothing” problem with the Viewer role, and you still need to maintain multiple workspaces in sync.
The right pattern is to have the multiple environments and use Apps for the user-facing layer. The Apps are still where end users go.
If you want to learn more about multi-environment design, read Deployment Pipelines in Power BI; How the Software Development Lifecycle Works? and How to organize workspaces in a Power BI environment?.
Summary
Sharing Power BI reports from a workspace is one of the areas where small mistakes lead to big maintenance problems down the line. Here is the recap:
The mistakes to avoid:
- ❌ Giving end users Admin, Member, or Contributor access on the workspace (they can edit and break things).
- ❌ Giving end users Viewer access on the workspace (they see every change immediately and they see all consumable content, including work in progress).
- ❌ Sharing each report individually with Manage Permissions (it doesn’t scale and creates a maintenance nightmare).
The right way:
- ✅ Use the workspace as your development environment for the BI team. Developers should have Contributor or Member access.
- ✅ Use a Power BI App (workspace app) to share content with end users — production-ready, generally available, with audiences for fine-grained access control.
- ✅ Or use an Org App for more flexibility, especially as it becomes generally available.
- ✅ Reserve workspace Viewer access for a small number of test users, for short periods.
The big rule: Workspace = developer environment. App = user environment. Keep them separate.
I hope this article helped you in your sharing strategy. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.
About RADACAD
My name is Reza Rad. Together with the team of RADACAD, we help organizations build and implement best-practice solutions for Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. We publish weekly content on Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and AI. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and explore our training and consulting services at radacad.com.
Reza is author of more than 14 books on Microsoft Business Intelligence, most of these books are published under Power BI category. Among these are books such as Power BI DAX Simplified, Pro Power BI Architecture, Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star, Power Query books series, Row-Level Security in Power BI and etc.
He is an International Speaker in Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Business Applications Summit, Data Insight Summit, PASS Summit, SQL Saturday and SQL user groups. And He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.
Reza’s passion is to help you find the best data solution, he is Data enthusiast.
His articles on different aspects of technologies, especially on MS BI, can be found on his blog: https://radacad.com/blog.