With the recent announcement (Announcing Public Preview of Multiple Audiences for Power BI Apps | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI) it is now possible to create multiple audiences in a single App Workspace.

What this means you can now have a single app workspace but create a view for specific users (each view is known as an Audience)

This blog post will detail how to manage multiple audiences with AAD Security Groups, where the only requirement will be to update the app when new reports get created and to which audience to make them available.

NOTE: PLEASE REMEMBER AS IT STAND ON SEP 2022, ONCE YOU UPGRADE TO USE THE AUDIENCE VIEW THERE IS NO WAY TO DOWNGRADE

Creating the AAD Security Groups

The first thing I did was to create 2 AAD Security Groups.

One AAD Security Group is for the people in the organization who are in the Sales department

The second AAD Security Group is for the people in the organization who are in the HR department

Creating the App Audiences

The next step was for me to an app audience.

I am going to create the first audience for Sales and a second audience for HR.

As shown below these are all the dashboards/reports and datasets in my App Workspace

I then clicked on Create App to create the App because in my App Workspace I had not created an app before

In the app setup, I put in the defaults and then clicked on Content. This is where I add in the content (dashboards and reports) that I want to be part of the app.

In my example I added the following as shown below.

I could then see the content in the app as shown below.

I then clicked on Audience, and this is where I can now create multiple audiences.

NOTE: By default, the first audience created is the name of the App Workspace name. As with my example it is called “Audience Testing”

I clicked on New Audience, to create my first audience for Sales.

Once again, I double clicked and renamed it from “New Audience” to “Sales”

I then hid the Human Resources dashboard and report, as well as the Sales and Marketing Dashboard as shown below.

Then on the right-hand side under manage audience I then typed in my AAD Sales Security Group I created earlier

I could then see the AAD Security Group Added

I then clicked on New Audience, to create my second audience for HR.

I double clicked and renamed it from “New Audience” to “HR”

I then hid the Sales dashboard and report, as well as the Human Resources Dashboard as shown below.

Then on the right-hand side under manage audience I then typed in my AAD Sales Security Group I created earlier

I could then see the AAD Security Group Added

I find that the default Audience name is not required because by default there is an “All” audience created when you create the app. I right clicked and selected Delete.

This is what it looks like once the app has been created, I can see the 2 audiences I created and the default one showing everything.

My Sales Audience will see the following

My HR Audience will see the following

Adding additional reports/dashboards

Now this is where using the AAD Groups and the new audiences makes it so much better to use.

In my example I am going to add in the dashboards for the Sales and HR Audience (This could also be adding new reports/dashboards into an app workspace).

All that is required is for me to add it to each audience and then update the app.

Here is where I unhide the dashboard for the Sales Audience (there are now 2 items shown in the list)

And then I unhide the dashboard for the HR Audience (there are now 2 items shown in the list)

The final step is to then update the app by clicking on the Update app button

The users would the see the new dashboard in each audience (Sales & HR respectively) when they next access the app.


Summary

In this blog post I have shown how using AAD Security groups with the new Power BI Audiences makes it super easy to make changes to the app and deploy them for different users.

If there are any questions or suggestions, please let me know in the comments section.

Thanks for reading!