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How-to 5 steps 3 min read Updated 11 November 2026

How to govern Power BI workspaces and sharing

Put an owner on every Power BI workspace, find what is shared outside your organization and clear what nobody uses.

Torsten Mandelkow Works with
How-to

What is Power BI governance?

Power BI governance is the set of owners, sharing rules and review routines that keep self-service reporting under control. It answers four questions for every workspace: who owns it, who can see it, what it holds and whether anyone still uses it.

In short

  • Power BI makes creating and sharing reports easy, so access and content grow faster than oversight.
  • A workspace shared with external users is the first thing to find and confirm.
  • Unused reports, datasets and licenses are cost you can remove.
  • An owner on every workspace is what makes each fix possible.

Step by step

Five steps move Power BI from open self-service to governed self-service.

  1. Inventory workspaces, reports and datasets

    List every workspace with its admins, members, reports, dashboards and datasets. You cannot govern what you cannot list.

    In Rencore:

  2. Name an owner for every workspace

    Assign at least two admins per workspace from the business team that uses it. Workspaces with no active admin go to the manager of the last known admin.

  3. Find and confirm external sharing

    List workspaces whose members or viewers include external users, and ask each owner to confirm the access is needed. Restrict who can share outside the organization in the Power BI tenant settings.

    Tip: Review external access on a shorter cycle than internal access.

    In Rencore:

  4. Clear what nobody uses

    Find reports, dashboards and datasets nobody has opened in 90 days and ask the owner to retire them, and check licenses held by people who do not use Power BI.

    In Rencore:

  5. Repeat and keep the evidence

    Run steps three and four every quarter, and keep a record of who confirmed or removed what. That record answers the next audit question about who can see your data.

Why Power BI drifts out of control

Self-service reporting is the strength of Power BI. Anyone can create a workspace, publish a report and share it, so workspaces appear without an owner, and reports reach people the author never intended.

Without clear ownership you get duplicate reports, inconsistent data and no single source of truth. Costs grow with every user and report, and nobody has the job of looking at what has stopped being used.

Connectors in this How-to

Each connector page in the Rencore docs lists the objects, policies, reports and actions behind these steps.

Common questions about Power BI governance

Who should own a Power BI workspace?
A named person in the business team that relies on the reports, with a second admin so the workspace survives a departure. The owner answers who has access, whether external users should, and whether the content is still used. A workspace owned by a person who has left is the Power BI version of an orphaned team: nobody can fix it, retire it or be asked about its sharing.
Do the Power BI admin portal and Microsoft Purview already cover this?
They cover a lot. The Power BI admin portal manages tenant settings such as who can share externally, and Microsoft Purview adds sensitivity labels and audit. Neither gives you a recurring answer to "which workspaces include external users, who owns them, and what has nobody opened in 90 days". That review is operational and has to be run, either with scripts and a schedule or with a tool built for it.
How do we stop Power BI costs from growing unnoticed?
Costs follow users, capacity and content. Count the workspaces, datasets and reports with no recent use and ask their owners to retire them, review who holds a Pro or Premium Per User license and whether the person still opens a report, and check whether a dataset is duplicated across workspaces. A cleanup that runs every quarter keeps the bill and the attack surface smaller.
How does Rencore help govern Power BI?
Rencore Governance inventories Power BI workspaces, dashboards, reports, datasets and apps. A policy lists the workspaces whose members or viewers include external users and shows how many were found and how that number changed over three months. It also surfaces artifacts nobody opened recently with their workspace owners, so cleanup starts from a named person.

Last updated 11 November 2026

About the author

Torsten Mandelkow

Torsten is co-founder and CAA at Rencore. During his time as a SharePoint consultant, he always tried to improve and automate the SharePoint development process, first by creating the SharePoint Software Factory (SPSF), and later by creating the SharePoint code analysis tools, today known as SPCAF. After an intermezzo for 3 years at Microsoft, he is now part of the RENCORE team and is responsible for the further technical development of all our tools.

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