Recently my boss reached out to me with an interesting question: How can she create a workspace in Fabric’s Data Engineering section? When she clicked on create a workspace, and then the Advance tab, her License mode options were restricted to Pro or Premium per-user. She didn’t have any of the Fabric options.
Our company is still under a Premium Capacity subscription which we will roll into a Fabric one once it completes, but according to Microsoft, our P1 Premium Capacity license is the same as a F64 license. In the Admin portal under Tenant setting, we have Microsoft Fabric options and even have the option Users can create Fabric items enabled. So what gives?
It turns out that in certain scenarios, you will need to also set this in the Capacity setting. In our case, we are keeping things pretty tight until we have our standards set up and will role things out to small groups. But to allow small groups to have access to this, you can add them to the contributor role under capacity setting. (I mean you could add people one by one, or enable for the whole org – you do you – but I’d advise against it. It’s hard to put the genie back into the bottle.) You could also add them to the admin role in the capacity setting, but again – I’d advise against it. These settings are ever changing and it’s hard enough keeping track of everything everywhere.
Yes you can add AD/Entra groups instead of users, and that’s really the route you want to go if you are dealing with anything large scale. I’m reminded of the Wizard of OZ when he says “ignore the man behand the curtain!” as my name is clearly listed in the image instead of a group, but that’s because I wanted to show a real world example.
Once you have added a user/group, click Apply. It took about 5-15 seconds for it to work it’s way through our system. Once that was complete, my boss had the Premium Capacity license available (which would allow her to create non-PBI Fabric items.)
What are some non-intuitive things you’ve found getting your company up and running on Fabric?
Data Work Mom 