How to upgrade classic workspaces to the new workspaces in Power BI

Starting 27th April, 2022, Power BI will begin rolling out the sequential automatic upgrade of all existing legacy v1 (classic) workspaces. As part of this process, on May 15th 2022, Power BI will begin the deletion of all empty v1 workspaces as part of the upgrade process.

Workspaces in Power BI are places to collaborate with colleagues to create collections of dashboards, reports and datasets. The new workspace experience helps you better manage access to content, with more granular workspace roles. Including other new workspaces features including contact lists and workspace OneDrive.

Things to plan before upgrading

• Review the access list and understand the permissions after upgrade

Upgrade considerations and limitations

• The URLs and IDs of your workspace, the content it contains and the app published from the workspace don’t change
• The Microsoft 365 group of your classic workspace isn’t affected by the workspace upgrade in Power BI. Any Teams, SharePoint sites, mailboxes, or other resources managed by Microsoft 365 aren’t changed
• Go back to classic workspace option available for 30 days after you upgrade (as long as you don’t use any new features in the new workspaces).

Permissions after upgrade

• Each Microsoft 365 group owner is added individually to the admin role for the upgraded workspace. The role its added to depends on whether the classic workspace is read-only or read-write.
• Because the Microsoft 365 group is given a role in the workspace, any user added to the Microsoft 365 group after upgrade has that role in the workspace.

Differences in roles before and after upgrade

• The new workspace experience enables you to give workspace roles to Microsoft 365 groups, security groups, or distribution lists.
• Members can share individual items and give access to the entire workspace through the Member, Contributor, or Viewer roles.
• Viewers can only view content and cant export underlying data or analyze in Excel for any workspace datasets, unless they have the build permission.
• After upgrade, you may consider creating a security or Microsoft 365 group or distribution list for workspace admins, instead of managing access through role assignments to individual users.

Licensing after upgrade

• Users in the Admin, Member, or Contributor workspace roles need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license to access the workspace
• If the workspace is in the shared capacity, users in the Viewer workspace role also need a Power BI Pro or PPU license to access the workspace.
• However, if the workspace is in a Premium capacity, users in the Viewer role don’t need a Pro or PPU license to access the workspace.

Other new workspace features

• The new workspace experience has features that the classic workspaces don’t have.
• One difference is the ability to set a contact list that’s different from the workspace admins or owners.
• One similarity is that its still connected to the Microsoft 365 group SharePoint document library.

Still unsure about upcoming changes to your Power BI workspaces? Get in touch today.