Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user

[dfraser2]

Right now, If I use PowerBI desktop to create a dataset, report and dashboard. I am not able to share it with a standard user. This effectively means that we have to either licence everyone as a pro (very expensive for 4k people), or not use the pro features at all (which isn't what we want). Pro users should be able to build and schedule the PowerBI, and then be able to share with any company user using AD security groups. Without these options the tool may not be a viable option...

[bryanca8881]

Recreating this ticket as a copy of the same wording. This issue is limiting our adoption of Power BI company wide, and the longer it persists, the more difficult "selling Power BI" internally will be. at a 50% markup on Office365, it's too expensive to make my entire company (11k users) all Power BI users. MS -> respond to this please.

[haydnr]

Thanks Bryant. We absolutely agree that for the most part end users will not be generating content. We also agree that generating a dashboard for yourself is a limited scenario. The whole point of the service is to host content for users to consume. I think the whole crux of this is what is reasonable on a per user basis. It is true that we could charge more for authoring but the reality is there are so few authors compared to the number of consumers that it’s probably not worth it and it’s easier to have a single, simple flat price for all users. We’re actually an independent team from SharePoint Online and we’re thinking only of the value we can create for our users.

[haydnr]

Hi All - I really appreciate all the honest and passionate feedback. I think at the end of the day it's a matter of the value we deliver and the total cost of the solution to you. Many of you are providing clear feedback that for your use case $10 x # users is not workable. I hope you can appreciate that it's also not feasible to support a case where for a single publisher at $10/user/month we support an unlimited # of free users. There is volume discounting available today so for larger user counts the price comes down. That being said I know a number of your are also in smaller organizations. Our original intent here was to make content creation free to make it as easy as possible to create content of value. That's one of the reasons the Power BI Desktop is free. We chose to build our business on the consumption of content of value, with a single simple price for all users. Perhaps we shouldn't have called it Pro because it creates a perception that it's for Pro or Power Users but really it's just the price for any paid user. Some of you are saying that price is too high for broad use. We're listening and taking that into consideration. The free offer was intended primarily as a way for individuals to try our service to see what it was capable of doing and to do this over a limited set of data (uploaded files and connections to SaaS services). Fundamentally our licensing is based on the capabilities of the consuming user, regardless of who created or published the content. Users with a free license will be able to consume content •they personally connect to using out of the box solutions for Dynamics, Salesforce, and SendGrid etc •they personally import from files like Excel workbooks •is shared with them that does not leverage Power BI Pro features as long as the total size of all the data they are bringing to their workspace is < 1GB Free users will not be able to consume content which leverages paid features including: •Content which is scheduled to be

[yoshihiro]

Thank you, Haydn Richardoson for your information about this issue.

[alan1]

Haydn, As I expressed to you personally, for almost every "Pro" scenario that doesn't have to be real time we can use Power BI Desktop to manually refresh and republish content daily. And that would be free for all. So the only person who benefits from the Pro license is the person who wants to automate refreshing of the data. That's why current model doesn't make any sense at _any_ price point. Even $1 to view the dashboards doesn't make sense. I understand that you need to make money, etc., but this thread clearly demonstrates that this is the way to do it. Obviously we don't know your internal organizational business structure, but I would guess you can negotiate with Office 365 team to roll "Pro Viewer" licenses into Enterprise O365 plans or something. Otherwise I just can't see how anyone could use Power BI Pro even if the absolute amounts are not as extreme as for some of the others posting here.

[taroen_pasman]

It seems microsoft is playing dumb, the solution has nothing to do with the issue/request.

[bryants1]

Haydn, Not sure why this was declined, or at least from a revenue standpoint I understand why. But I think MS is missing the big picture, most businesses are never going to use the product is they have to license everyone with Pro. It is completely useless to say that pro users can share none pro content with standard users. Who would want that. The feature set of pro is what everyone wants to use, standard features are just to scaled back to make the product viable. We will continue to use other options until MS decides this product is a failure and revamps the licensing.

[bryants1]

I understand you are independent, but I think the target audience is those people leveraging the Microsoft stack. Fair pricing is tough, unfortunately I cannot answer that for you, but I think the real value of the product is as an added service to the Microsoft product line. Even for our small company it is $2500 a month, and to be completely honest, it is not a feasible. While Power Bi has many nice features, it is not as robust as other solutions that do not have a $30,000/year price tag. They might be expensive, but they are in most cases much less to purchase and have a small annual maintenance fee. Power Bi has promise, but I think it will not last as a paid service and will eventually be free or rolled into the Azure platform. The numbers just don't pencil to me.

[bryants1]

Haydn, Thanks for the feedback. However I still feel like the Power BI team is missing the big picture. End users will for the most part not be generating any content, as you can see from the posts, it is falling to technical staff, and on that same line, who is really going to generate a dashboard for just themselves. How worthless is that. The whole point of a dashboard is to present data to people in an easy to consume format. I don't think anyone on the forum expects it to be free, we just expect it to be reasonable. Only your team knows that value based on how many licenses you may have sold, but I would be honest in saying that I probably could not cost justify anything more than a couple dollars to have the ability to view pro content. That said, I may be willing to pay a bit more to author pro content in that model. This to me just seems like a scam job to fix a problem with sharepoint online not being able to access external content, so power bi exists to do so, but we are going to charge you even more. What a hum. SharePoint Online/Office 365 was sold as a cloud service so you don't have to host internally, but I am still amazed at the shortcomings of features that have been stripped out. It is more like sharepoint services than SharePoint.

[kyle_horseman]

I'm in the same position as pretty much every other commenter here. Giving a Pro license to all of our users who are only viewing reports would be ludicrously cost prohibitive. We've already invested a great deal of time and effort as well as the money for all of the Pro licenses that make sense. The decision to decline this is a complete deal breaker, and it means that all of this time, effort and money has been an utter waste because we will have to start from scratch with some other solution. Hard to imagine what sort of organization could possibly make any real use of this software with this licensing plan.