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[Martin Frisch]

Dear all,

is it possible to automate the creation, member assignment of a Power BI Workspace with Power Shell? Does anyone tried it or even an example script for it?

It it also possible to automate the publication to an app and user assignment?

Thanks for your input and best regards,
Martin

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Martin Frisch
BI Developer
Trützschler GmbH & Co. KG

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[Norm Young]

Hello Martin,

It is possible using the “Users and groups cmdlets in Exchange Online“.

For our Power BI Groups, we manually created the Groups and then maintained membership in the Group based on Active Directory roles. I wrote a blog post it if interested.

I hope this helps.

Norm

Power BI Group management using Active Directory roles and PowerShell

Norm Young		remove preview
Power BI Group management using Active Directory roles and PowerShell Office 365 Groups are an excellent way of scoping and securing Power BI content for end users. In addition to a content and security container the Group construct offers the best of Office 365 with hooks into OneDrive for Business, Outlook, Planner, SharePoint, Stream and Yammer. View this on Norm Young >

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Norm Young
Data Architect
Brock University
St. Catharines ON
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[Martin Frisch]

Hello Norm,

thanks for your reply and the blog link. Its quite interesting,. So you are using this approach only for maintenance of the Workspace Members or also for Workspace App Users?

Best regards,
Martin

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Martin Frisch
BI Developer
Trützschler GmbH & Co. KG

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[Norm Young]

Hi Martin,

So you are using this approach only for maintenance of the Workspace Members or also for Workspace App Users?

Yes that is correct – maintain workspace members only.

That being said, we are deploying Power BI Premium this week and are switching to the App model for all of our solutions. We are taking advantage of the “Install app automatically” feature for the AD roles that we were previously using to populate the workspace membership (see link below for more information).

As I understand it the “Install app automatically” feature only refreshes the membership listing when a new version of the App is published. New users added to the AD role between App publishing will be provided instructions to manually get the App.

I hope this helps.

Norm

Install and use apps with dashboards and reports in Power BI – Power BI

Microsoft		remove preview
Install and use apps with dashboards and reports in Power BI – Power BI In Power BI, apps bring related dashboards and reports together, all in one place. View this on Microsoft >

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Norm Young
Data Architect
Brock University
St. Catharines ON
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[John Brandt]

We’ve been moving down the automation path as well, and I believe all the operations you mention can be scripted one way or another, using PowerShell or a combo of PowerApps and Flow.   Here are a few links to seed your thinking: 

Investigate the Power BI REST APIs, there are a number of them supporting administration and deployment including creation of groups (formerly workspaces), addition of members, etc.

Also, here is a Blog I just came across which details how to do all this in a PowerShell.  While cloning an group may not be your requirement, the framework will support many use cases. 

Fyi, we are an ISV with has different report architecture and lifecycle requirements from most corporate organizations. We’re working with embedded applications so our users never have direct access to PBI apps/groups, so these tools are critical for us to provision and administer BI environments for our customers. 

Thanks!

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John Brandt
VP Engineering, IT and Security
FiREapps
Lake Oswego OR
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[Martin Frisch]

Thanks. Those links are quite interesting and creation and managing Workspaces works fine. But I think there are no methods for managing apps (Publish, Update, User Management,…). Or does anyone found something like this?

Best regards,
Martin

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Martin Frisch
BI Developer
Trützschler GmbH & Co. KG
02166 607-405
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