What's Power BI content pack? Power BI content pack is a package that allows you to package up and share your own dashboard, reports and data sets with your coworkers in the same organization. Content packs are in one location: content gallery. Your published content packs are secured to security groups and office 365 groups you belong to. As a creator, you can also expand and restrict access to the content pack.
But hold on, Microsoft has provided other BI tools for collaboration. SharePoint Excel service, Performance Point dashboards, SSRS integrated mode. Why we need another collaboration tool, what’s the difference among these tools and when Power BI content pack be used?
One of the standout feature in Power BI content pack is that it allows viewer to create a private copy and then personalize the dashboards, reports. All other three tools are ready only. Personalization gives other colleagues an opportunity to interpret the data in different perspective ways.
The other unique feature is that creators do the security admin work instead of SharePoint site admin. It releases some workload from site admin. It improves the collaboration efficiency.
BUT, there is a restriction. The content pack doesn’t work on SSAS data source. If your dataset is from SSAS data source, then other tools can meet the data source requirements.
Since the content pack owned by the creator, it raises other administration questions:
- What if the creator leaves the company? Can the ownership of these content packs owned by that ex-employee transfer to another employee?
- What if the creator published some confidential content but he is not accessible for a while, how to pull these content offline?
I believe Microsoft Power BI may need to consider add these features to Power BI Admin Center to allow IT administrators to perform these options.
Creating, managing, updating and deleting organizational content packages are super easy. BUT, if consumers created a personalized copy and creator changed original content pack dashboard and report, all tiles from the original content pack will be gone in the personalized copy. It ends up to two versions: personalized version and the new updated version.
Anyway, this is still an exciting feature. It makes super simple to discover organization BI data in one place, content gallery. Microsoft, you did a great work!
Very clear-cut information easy to understand. Thanks for providing for more updates.
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