Forum Discussion
Fixes to Power BI Pro License Required Dialogs
I would love to see where the conflict was found within regards to this issue. Would you be willing to point it out?
The problem is not "Workspaces" in general, but with Group Workspaces. The content within a Group Workspace is and has been, clearly defined as a Pro feature all along.
The individual architecting the solution needs to clear those items before creating a solution of any size.
A Free user consuming content from within a Group Workspace is a clear, very clear violation of the documentation.
Thoughts?
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-power-bi-pro-content-what-is-it/
Power BI Pro content - what is it?
Power BI free and Pro licenses are different based on the kind of content users can consume. If your content contains any of the following items, it's Power BI Pro content:
Data from a DirectQuery dataset, such as SQL Server Analysis Services tabular data, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, or Apache Spark for HDInsight.
Data from a dataset that refreshes more frequently than daily.
Data from a dataset that connects to on-premises data using the Power BI Gateway - Personal or the On-premises Data Gateway.
Data from a live connection to Azure Analysis Services.
Data (including reports, dashboards or tiles) from a dataset that uses Row-level security (RLS).
A dashboard or report that's installed from an organizational content pack.
A dashboard, report, or dataset that's contained in a group workspace.
A dashboard that contains data streamed at a rate above 10k rows/hour.
Conversely, if your content contains only the following items it will be consumable by both Power BI free and Pro users:
A dashboard or report connected to content packs for services (e.g. Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, and Google Analytics).
A dashboard or report with data imported from files such as Excel spreadsheets, Power BI Desktop, and CSV.
Tiles pinned from a report in SQL Server Reporting Services.
For example, if you create a manufacturing dashboard that updates progress multiple times during the day, anyone consuming that dashboard would need a Power BI Pro license. Or, if you create a report using the Power BI Gateway - Enterprise, then another that uses the personal gateway, anyone consuming or interacting with either of those reports would need a Power BI Pro license.
If you want to share your Power BI Pro content with users, they can sign up for a free trial of Power BI Pro, and gain access to your content during the trial period.
For a list of Power BI Pro features (and how those features compare to a free Power BI license), take a look at Power BI Pricing.
You seem to miss the point of everyone's frustrations. While what you say is true of "what is pro content," some of those items are things that make using PowerBI a total deal breaker for mostly every company out there in one way or another.
For example, RLS. Consuming a report locked down for security, shouldn't not require the end user to have a pro-liscense!
I want to automate about 10 Excel reports to avoid manual reporting, and then share truncated data specific to one employees stats and performance without them seeing their peers numbers. ME having a pro-liscense makes sense to have the ability to lock out their ability to filter the report/dashboard to a co-worker. For them to read it? Insanity!
Microsoft would probably see a higher drive in adoption of pro subscriptions if they allowed view only access to all users of any reports created with pro features. Consumption is very different from collaboration or content creation.
The pro liscense truly should be based upon a user's ability to create not consume. This would be like charging an extra $10 a month to everyone in an organization to read a read only word document on top of their O365 subscription. In my org, where we have 60,000+ employees, if MS thinks we would pay $600,000 a MONTH for the privalge of reading a report, they are out of their bloody minds.
In the above scenario, we will spend $0. If they allowed consumption of reports made with pro liscense, we might have a thousand users a month who would be able to have a pro liscense. That would be revenue vs. no revenue, and it seems to be a consensus as these things keep coming up.
We are already paying for 40,000 O365 subscriptions....