Office 365 Groups/Microsoft Teams contain a host of useful components such as SharePoint, Exchange Online and Planner. Another component of Office 365 groups by default is a Power BI Workspace.

There are two types of Power BI Workspaces: Classic and Modern Workspaces. Modern Workspaces allow for granular permissions and are standalone objects with an enhanced feature set . Classic Workspaces however, are essentially Office 365 groups and access is managed by group membership. For most use cases Modern Workspaces meet all requirements for Power BI.

The impact of having many Classic Workspaces is that you also have many Office 365 Groups, potentially not following governance process that is applied to something like Microsoft Teams. You also do not necessarily want a new Power BI Workspace to be provisioned for every Team, Group, Planner, Modern SharePoint Site etc. that is created in the environment.

Luckily, by setting the option: “Power BI Block classic workspace creation” to Enabled, we can prevent the creation of Classic Workspaces. With this enabled, new Office 365 Groups and any associated objects will not provision a new Power BI Workspace. This helps keep our Power BI environment tidy and limit sprawl.

While here, there are a lot of options that can help us control the Power BI platform and protect against external sharing, data export etc. It’s also worthwhile limiting the creation of Modern Workspaces to a specific group of users who have received training and you can trust to adhere to corporate policy.

There are a lot of configuration items in Power BI that tend to be missed as Power BI itself can be user driven with little IT input into usage. I recommend reviewing these settings periodically to ensure there are no potential risks with the default functionality.

For more information of what makes and Office 365 Group, I highly recommend this page.