The members added to the workspace are most commonly report authors who will connect to dataset(s) to develop reports in Power BI Desktop. These reports can then be published back to the app workspace and their visuals can be pinned to dashboards in the Power BI service as per the previous Chapter 13, Designing Power BI Dashboards and Architectures.

Since app workspaces have a one-to-one relationship with Power BI apps, workspace administrators are often familiar with the users or groups of users who will consume the content as well as other subject matter experts, such as the dataset designer described in the Project roles section of Chapter 7, Planning Power BI Projects.

In the following screenshot, Jennifer has created an app workspace and added Mark as a member with edit rights:

Edit app workspace

The Edit workspace dialog is exclusive to workspace admins. In this example, Mark's edit rights as a member may be sufficient or Jennifer can revise Mark's role from Member to Admin so that he can also add other members. A security group in Azure Active Directory cannot be used to add members to a workspace. However, security groups can be referenced when publishing an app workspace as a Power BI app to enable groups of users to view the content of the workspace.

In almost all scenarios, only users who create and manage Power BI content are added as members of app workspaces. However, if a report page from the app workspace is going to be embedded in a SharePoint Online site, the members of the SharePoint Online site will need to be added as members of the app workspace. Both Power BI Pro and Power BI free users can view embedded Power BI content from SharePoint Online. In the case of Power BI free users, however, the app workspace containing the embedded content needs to be assigned to Power BI Premium capacity. Additional information on embedding Power BI content in SharePoint Online is included in Chapter 17, Creating Power BI Apps and Content Distribution.

Users with Power BI free licenses can technically be added to app workspaces via the Edit workspace dialog. The free user will see the name of the app workspace in the Power BI service but the following dialog will be prompted when trying to access the workspace:

Power BI free user attempting to access an app workspace

The preceding dialog is also prompted to free users when trying to utilize other Power BI Pro features, such as sharing a dashboard, accessing a shared dashboard from shared (non-Premium) capacity, or creating an email subscription to a report or dashboard.

Administrators of Power BI deployments have the ability to view the creation of Pro trial versions via the Office 365 audit logs. For example, a user assigned to the Power BI admin role (a role in Office 365), could analyze the level of activity for Pro trial users and assign available Pro licenses. Additionally, the process of assigning Pro licenses to users can be automated via PowerShell scripts so that administrators can focus on other governance and security issues. The Office 365 audit logs and options for accessing this data is described in Chapter 18, Administering Power BI for an Organization.