Endorsement in Power BI, Part 1, The Basics - BI Insight

One of the great abilities of Power BI is the ability for users to collaborate in creating and sharing artifacts, but that convenience comes with the cost of having conversations about the quality and trustworthiness as the number of artifacts in large organisations grows.

Endorsement is the answer to this.

But before we start, we need to know what content means in Power BI.

Update: Microsoft recently update the definition of content, which is slightly different from when this blog was written. To ensure a clearer understanding for readers, content has been replaced with artifact as a more generic term.

What is endorsement in Power BI?

After adopting Power BI in an organisation, the number of artifacts that users create and share grows. Imagine an organisation with hundreds of reports, datasets, and apps. It would be confusing and rather time-consuming for the users to identify the trusted resources without a proper mechanism. Power BI provides the Endorsement feature to enable organisations to represent the level of the artifacts’ trustworthiness, so the users can confidently use them to gain insights.

There are currently two levels of endorsement available in Power BI Service:

• Promoted: the artifact that is in good shape and has an acceptable level of trust. The business has used the artifact long enough to prove the provided information and insights are correct and very close to reality. The promoted artifact is identifiable by the Promoted tag. For instance, the following image shows a promoted report:

• Certified: the artifact is highly trusted, containing high-quality information and insights. The artifact has gone through extensive certification processes, including (but not limited to) auditing, quality assurance, security, and privacy compliance. The certified content gets a Certified badge to make it identifiable, as shown in the following image:

Which artifacts support endorsement?

Currently, we can endorse the following artifacts in Power BI Service:

• Datasets
• Dataflows
• Reports
• Apps

Unfortunately, the endorsement currently does not support dashboards.

Who can endorse, promote and certify artifacts?

Endorsement

Depending on the endorsement, different users can endorse the artifacts in Power BI Service.

Promotion

Anyone with “write” permission on the workspace containing the artifacts can promote it. Therefore, the users or security groups with one of the Admin, Member, or Contributor roles in the Workspace can promote the artifact.

However, one should not promote the artifact just because he/she can. The organisations usually have an artifact promotion process to follow, but the boundaries around promoting the artifact are often much more relaxed than certifying it.

Certification

Certifying the artifact is a massive responsibility. The organisations often have strict certification processes including but not limited to code review, quality assurance, data stewardship, privacy and security compliance, and more. Therefore, only authorised users can certify the artifact, while others can request artifact certification.

Power BI administrators can grant security groups to certify the artifacts. The organisations often have a specific security group created for certification that the Power BI administrators can use to grant the certification within the Power BI Admin Portal. While artifact promotion often has pretty relaxed processes, the organisation tends to have more strict rules and processes for certain content.

The next part of this series explains:

• How Power BI administrators grant certification rights to security groups.
• How to endorse the artifacts.

Stay tuned.