Error message: Upgrade to current PowerBi license to view the report - help

[RichOB]

Hi, 

My colleague and I both have the same Powerbi Pro license. To get my reports live I Create > Publish > Embed into SharePoint web page, set the sharepoint permissions to certain employees and they can see the reports.

Today my colleague followed the same steps, Created a PowerBi Report > Published > Embed into a SharePoint web page. The other employees who are trying to view it are getting the error message "Upgrade the current PowerBI License to view the report" for my colleague's report, but they can still see the reports that I've added to the SharePoint web page. 

We set the same permissions for the same employees. Any ideas why they can see mine but not her reports?

Thanks!

[christinepayton]

All viewers need a pro license to view reports unless you have premium capacity assigned. Embedding in SharePoint doesn't get around the licensing. 

[RichOB]

What about people in an organisation that have a free Power Bi license? Can't they view a report without having any other functionality? 

If I'm the only one creating reports, surely a few hundred people in an org don't need a Pro license just to view a dashboard?

[christinepayton]

What free license are you speaking of? A pro trial would work until it expires. But yes that is how licensing for the product works - otherwise you could have an org with 100k people and only pay for one pro license.

There is a premium tier where you pay for capacity instead, and viewers are "free", but if you only have a few hundred users it won't be cheaper than buying pro for everyone - it's only cheaper for orgs with thousands of people. 

[RichOB]

Hi @christinepayton. Thanks for your reply. That makes sense what you said about the 100k people and just one Pro license.

Here's the article. It mentions what you said about the Premium License, but also having "unlimited content sharing to Free Licenses." 

Feature availability for users with Free licenses in the Power BI service - Power BI | Microsoft Lea...

The Microsoft website shows the monthly price for Premium as being £16.40 per user...and that article says "Designers need to publish that content to a group workspace backed by a Premium capacity.". I'm guessing the "being backed by Premium capacity" bit is additional to the £16.40 a month?

I think you said it above, but in your opinion, if I have 120 managers in my Org who need to only view interactive reports and dashboards that refresh on a monthly basis, is the best way to get 120 Pro licenses?

Thanks again for your help

[christinepayton · Accepted solution]

Yeah, that's how the premium works - basically you pay for capacity, apply it to a workspace, and have unlimited free users. They have an option to pay premium per-user, but that's only really useful if you're an org that has one of the pro bundles like E5 and need premium features tacked on for a few people.

The thing is, not all premium capacity SKUs allow unlimited users - I think the minimum is F64/P1, which is fairly spendy (in the $thousands per month range)... so it's usually cheaper to go pro unless you are a large org. You might talk to your sales rep - it's part of their job to help you figure out which makes the most sense for your use case. 

A lot of orgs go with the E5 licensing for other reasons, like the extra security features, and that'll come with Power BI pro - so it's a good choice on its own merit, and PBI is a bonus there.