Power BI's odd integration with Office 365 Groups

Power BI is a cloud-based analytics application that can be bought as part of an Office 365 plan or added to for specific users. It allows users to analyze datasets drawn from different sources (the most basic of which is a CSV-format spreadsheet) and generate views of the data in visual and report formats.

Microsoft is keen that Office 365 Groups should be seen as a new shared identity that can be used to gain access to information drawn from across the service. The idea is that you add people to groups and they can immediately access all of the resources available to those groups. Out-of-the-box, each group comes with a mailbox (to hold threaded conversations and a shared calendar), notebook, and document library, but many hints were given at Ignite that Microsoft was going to expand the capabilities of groups to be used elsewhere within the service, such as the ability to access Dynamics CRM.

Using groups instead of individual accounts to manage access to information is usually a good idea. Mail-enabled security groups have been used for this purpose for on-premises Exchange environments for years. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is also based on security groups and the same general principle exists. You join the group to gain access to resources; that access is removed when you leave the group.

Office 365 Groups are a little different because they come fully-equipped for collaboration. However, they also provide that single identity that can be recognized and respected by applications across Office 365, as soon as those applications are upgraded to allow this to happen. SharePoint Online, for instance, was recently enhanced to allow users to share documents and other data with Office 365 Groups as easily as they can with other users.

In any case, Microsoft has also launched the ability of Power BI users to create and use Office 365 Groups to manage access to shared workspaces, within which datasets and reports are stored. The integration is pretty straightforward and draws on much of the work done to allow groups to be managed in Outlook Web App (OWA). You need to have a Power BI Pro license to be able to use the integration with Office 365 Groups.

When you enter Power BI, you see groups defined in the tenant listed under “Workspaces” in the left-hand navigation pane. Clicking on the name of a group reveals any information held in the workspace that is accessible to members of the group. It’s just the same as accessing a document library. The other data sources available to the group (conversations, calendar, notebook, and documents) can be accessed through the ellipsis […] menu.

So far, so good. The issues arise when you create a new group. As you probably know from previous reports, Office 365 controls the ability of users to create new groups via the GroupCreationEnabled setting in the OWA mailbox policy that’s applied to the mailbox. For example, this command updates a policy to prohibit group creation.

Set-OWAMailboxPolicy –Identity “OWAMaiboxPolicy-Default” –GroupCreationEnabled $False

Obviously Power BI knows nothing about OWA mailbox policies and so it proceeds to allow any and all users to create groups as they like. This is not a good thing because it can lead to a proliferation of groups that confuse users, clutter up the GAL, and generally get in the way of good management practice. I’ve asked Microsoft whether they plan to do anything to address this problem.

I also noticed some differences in the groups created through Power BI with those created through OWA or Outlook 2016.

It seems like Power BI is doing just enough to create Office 365 Groups for use by Power BI, which is fine until you put that view up against the assertion that Office 365 Groups are intended to function across the entire service. I hope they view this implementation very much as a first effort and will fix the problems outlined above ASAP.

It’s true that you can manage the groups created by Power BI with OWA, PowerShell, or Outlook 2016 to fix things up afterwards, but it seems a pity that Power BI has implemented its support of Office 365 Groups in such a half-hearted and unthoughtful manner.

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