Forum Discussion
Licensing / Pricing / Sharing.
Solved: Re: Power BI Pro: Data security and licensing - Microsoft Fabric Community Thank you Collinq for the earlier responses and WP links.
Quick background: Background: In my organization, we have an in-house application to generate reports. currently we generate using xls and share the same with our customers for their further analysis (they share the raw data, which we process and generate report). Now for our own internal processing and cleansing data we have started using P-BI and are able to generate customer specific reports which are shared via email manually to each one.
Back with some follow-up questions:
What is very clear to me now is: one has to have a lic (P BI Pro) to view the report / dashboard.
- Is there a view only licence at a more economical price (pl forgive for such a silly question) or the default starting lic as per MS PBI website is USD 10$ / user / month? For viewing / creating / sharing etc.? This related to point 2.d below (basically one with just view permission for people outside my org domain).
- I understand sharing the report / dashboard within the organization.
- From PBI desktop on my laptop, I create a dashboard, I go and publish the same. Then I can go to app.powerbi.com and see the same in my workspaces and view from there. ALL OK till here.
- Also I can share it within my org and people can see and share, of course I can disable share. Again all ok till here.
- How can I share with customers outside my org. ( for example mine is [email protected]) , is it “Specific people can view” this option? Because it says in pink text : “One or more e-mail addresses with the following domains are outside your organization: [email protected]” and the “send” is disabled? So not sure how to share now?
- How can I purchase the lic for my customer say [email protected] and let him know. Or what is the industry best practise: can I say my report is P BI ready and happy to share with you, but you need to get a lic on your own. Initially I would like to kind of “gift” the lic from my org side.
- When I go to app.powerbi.com, what is the difference between:
- Share option
- Which I see when I select a report
- Because what I felt was when I use this option and share with my team members, they need to login in power bi pro, activate their lic (free trial starts 59 days left) and they see a similar workspace and then they can click and see the report.
- And File -> Embed report -> website / portal option.
- If I share that link, they just see the dashboard with no my workspace option and sign in etc. Does this mean, I don’t have to purchase the lic for the customer and I can just share these website / portal links? Of course this is just read / view only?
- Share option
Any guidance will be highly appreciated.
Thanks,
Gaurav.
5 Replies
Anonymous I will try but there is a lot more when it come to licensing and sharing:
#1 - This is the cheapest. But there are free viewing licenses if you have Power BI Premium, P1 cost $5000 USD/month (I think). So if you have 600 viewers, instead of paying $10 per month which will cost $6000, P1 will be cheaper in this case. It is a decision tree and there are other things why you go for a premium, in your case, we are purely talking about licensing.
#2.3 - Sharing outside org, assuming everyone using Pro, either your external client needs to buy a Pro license under their tenant, you share with them and they will log in with their credentials (assuming they have Pro) and they will able to view the report but if they are not buying pro license then you will buy under your tenant and give them new ID ([email protected]) and they will use that to login to access the reports. End of the day someone has to pay for Pro license.
#3.2 - you don't want to use this, It is not secure, whoever so ever has that link will able to see the report. You will be putting org data at risk, also if tomorrow you want to use RLS (Row Level Security), you will not be able to use this method. End of the day, this is generally used where you have some public information and want to share it with the general public without any data security risk.
Hi Parry2K,
Sincere apologies for the delay. Thanks a lot for the detailed answer.
A little more elaboration will help.
From your answer 2.3 above: bottomline is any end user has to have a p bi pro lic to view the report.
Now from your 3.2 i also understand that file-> embed-> portal is not necessarily a great idea from data security perspective.
Elaborating my use case a bit more better sharing my idea:
Our application has its own authentication ( user name / pwd ) and hosted on https. Inside this applicaiton after the customers login with their respective credentials, they will see the so called "PBI dashboard" BUTTON ONLY. This button is custom configured to point to this embedded link. Now when a customer after logging in our application, clicks the button, am assuming he will be directed to the report page / link, where he will be asked to signin ( as he would need a pbi pro lic either from his org or we buy for his specfic email id in our tenant) and then he would need to request access, which we will give and hopefully only then he will see the report.
Therefore in this case in order for the customer to see the report that we as service provider are generating:
1. 1st authentication in our app
2. 2nd authentication in P BI Pro lic check ( PBI Signin )
3. Report access
Therefore, is there the data security risk still there? Or am i missing something?
I mean we arent publishing that link anywhere on a public portal / site etc...so just trying to understand.
Thanks,
Gaurav.
Anonymous no risk in this case, basically, they are going to log to the Power BI service using Pro. Again, if I understood correctly, you are not sharing using publish to web which is the risk.
Thanks for the lightening response! What a relief! :-).
Ok, please allow me to elaborate a bit more.
1. In my local laptop for example i generate 3 reports for my 3 customers. Then i publish the same to app.powerbi.com ( my workspace ).
2. Then i login app.powerbi.com, for example click 1 report. Then go to file-> embed-> portal, get the customer 1 specfic link, go to my application, configure the reports button ( mentioned earlier ) to point to this specific link.
3. Like this i configure my application for the 3 respective customers for their credentials to the 3 custom / specific links from the embed option.
4. Thats it. I tell them to login the application (1st level authentication) and click on the reports / dashboard button respectively to see the reports. So when they click they are re-directed to the 3 separate links and in due course, need to signin for pro lic check, request access check and see the report.
I am not publishing to public facing web portal, when i say portal its my application.
Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Gaurav.