Workspaces and apps
A workspace is where content is developed and where a team collaborates. An app is a packaged, read-only presentation of selected workspace content, published to a wider audience.
The pattern is: build in the workspace, publish an app for consumers. Consumers get a clean navigation experience and never see work in progress.
Roles
Four workspace roles, from most to least privileged:
Admin — everything, including adding and removing members. Member — publish, share, and edit content. Contributor — create and edit content but not publish the app or manage access. Viewer — read only.
Give report developers Contributor, not Member, unless they genuinely need to manage the app. Least privilege applies here as anywhere.
Gateways
An on-premises data gateway is required when the Service needs to reach a data source that isn't publicly accessible — a SQL Server on your network, a file share, an on-prem SAP system.
Standard mode is shared across an organisation and supports scheduled refresh, DirectQuery, and live connections. Personal mode is for one user and supports scheduled refresh only. Cloud sources like Azure SQL or SharePoint Online don't need a gateway at all.
Scheduled refresh
Configure refresh in the dataset settings: credentials, then a schedule. Pro workspaces allow up to 8 refreshes per day; Premium/Fabric capacity allows 48.
Incremental refresh partitions large tables so only recent partitions reload — configured in Power BI Desktop with RangeStart and RangeEnd parameters, and essential once tables get big.
Set failure notifications. A silently failing refresh serving stale data is worse than a visible error, because nobody knows to distrust the numbers.