Skip to main content

Workspace Management in the Admin Portal

Headshot of article author Kay Unkroth

This has been a great year for Power BI service admins. In July, we shipped APIs and PowerShell cmdlets for Power BI management, and recently we also released a preview version of a Workspaces page in the Power BI Admin Portal (see the screenshot below). This page lists all the workspaces in a tenant and lets you examine pretty much the same workspace properties that you can also obtain from the Power BI management cmdlets. In this way, the new Workspaces page eliminates the need to use PowerShell for the most common admin operations.

The initial preview release provides a read-only experience. You can filter and sort the workspaces list and display the details for a given workspace. There is also a pagination control that lets you display between 5 and 100 workspaces at a time, which is particularly convenient if your Power BI environment contains thousands of workspaces. More capabilities will come with subsequent interactions, such as the ability to add and remove users from one or multiple workspaces in a single step, recovering deleted workspaces, migrating workspaces to Premium capacities, and upgrading legacy workspaces to the modern experience.

It is noteworthy that the column values in the Workspaces table are aligned with the output of the management cmdlets. But if you are not familiar with the cmdlet output, you might find some column values unintuitive. Particularly the Type column might leave you wondering. Refer to the following table as a reference.

Column Description
Name The name of the workspace.
Description The description of the workspace.
Type Can contain one of the following values:

  • PersonalGroup – A personal workspace of a Power BI user
  • Group – A legacy workspace based on Office 365 groups
  • Workspace – A modern workspace
State Can contain one of the following values:

  • Active – A regular workspace that is available and accessible
  • Deleted – A deleted workspace that still exists in the Power BI service
  • Orphaned – A workspace without a user account with administrator permissions
  • Removing – A deleted workspace marked for permanent removal
Read only This column corresponds to the IsReadOnly property of legacy workspaces:

  • False – Members can edit power BI content
  • True – Members can only view Power BI content

Note that this property is always false for modern workspaces.

On dedicated capacity This column corresponds to the IsOnDedicatedCapacity property, which is true if the workspace is on a dedicated capacity, such as Power BI Premium.

Note also that the Workspaces page highlights a new user experience that we are also going to replicate across other Admin Portal pages. You can already see this if you go to the Embed Codes page. Thanks to the new UI, you can now sort and filter the embed codes in your tenant, and delete those in bulk that infringe your organization’s policies for Web publishing. So, please take the new UI for a test drive and let us know of any additional requirements you might have through the usual Power BI community channels or as comments to this article below. And as always, stay tuned for more announcements as we add further capabilities to the Admin Portal.