Forum Discussion
Fixes to Power BI Pro License Required Dialogs
A Power BI Pro license is required to view dashboards or reports that contain Pro content. In some cases, our enforcement of this licensing logic caused confusion about whether content was Pro or not. We are releasing several fixes that make this experience more consistent for users.
Please note that there is no change to our licensing policy - the conditions for what is Pro content, which continue to remain the same.
The fixes are as follows:
- Dashboards and reports created in Group Workspaces that were subsequently shared to other users without Pro licenses did not trigger the standard License Required Dialog. Instead there was a non-standard treatment of this Pro content for viewers without Pro licenses. We have fixed this issue, so these consumers will now see the standard 'License Required' dialog that is consistent with other Pro content scenarios.
- In some circumstances, users that attempted to view Pro content without a Pro license saw the standard License Required Dialog, but upon closing the dialog saw partial content, causing confusion about whether a license was required. We have fixed this issue, so these viewers will no longer see any Pro content if they do not have a Pro license.
- In some circumstances, direct links to reports that contained Pro content did show the standard 'License Required' dialog for users without Pro. We have fixed this issue, so these viewers will see the standard 'License Required' dialog.
Ajay
76 Replies
This "fix" is very unfortunate and a huge deal-breaker for our company.
Like Bhartman30 - I too work in a company where a small amount of Pro-users (aprox. 5 developers) keep and maintain the dashboards/reports in a PowerBI group so that we can fill in for each other. But it was previously possible for all the end-users (currently aprox. 200 people) to view the final reports with free-licenses.
Now without prior warning all end-users has been locked out of the reports, and they suddenly require a Pro-license simply to view the reports. This is a huge stepback both for our current work-processes in the company, but also a stepback for our journey to furhter integrate PowerBI in the company.
Historically we have been using Tableau, but during the last year we have slowly moved towards Microsoft PowerBI due to a more attractive pricing model. Tableau costs 2.000$ per developer for a lifetime license, while PowerBI only cost 10$ pr. month per Pro-license. But with Tableau only the report developers need a license while all end-users can view reports free of charge.
Our hope was to expand the use of PowerBI from the current 200 end-users to about 2.000 end-users. The pricing argument is now all of the sudden no longer a valid argument for us to help push this PowerBI integration since it is now:
Tableau:
5 developers x 2.000$= 10.000$ (lifetime)
2.000 end-users x 0$ = 0$
PowerBI:
5 developers x 10$ = 50$ (per year)
2.000 end-users x 10$ = 20.000$ (per year)
If you were storing a report within a Group Workspace and/or allowing your report to connect to data sources using an On-Premises
Gateway, while the users consuming the report were users with free licenses, you were in direct conflict with the documentation.
I do not believe this is a setback, but rather a planning step that did not take place on the individual(s) that architected the solution.
Unfortunately in my experience with MS documentation and actuals, there are numerous direct conflicts.
In this case they could have just as easily changed the wording in the documentation and left the feature of Workspaces functioning with Free Licenses. However, they chose to remove a working feature that many people have been using. So in this case it is neither an architectural issue or a user issue, it is a decision by MS team to eliminate a functioning feature.
Have a great rest of your day!
Our organization is up 40/60 split between Pro users and Free users. We use the Group work-space to segregate reports designed for seperate business units and a very small group of us actually do the creating and designing. The group workspaces effectively allow us to deploy the dashboards and most of organization consumes a dashboard currently housed in a group regardless of pro license. This feature has been available to our organization since at least July of last year and we have moved forward with this strategy.
The change, without any heads-up or communication, will cause significant problems with our end users and will require major rework to direct these dashboards to a different workspace.Does the Power BI team have a plan for how users will deal with disruption? For example, will we will be able to move dashboards, reports, and datasets to a free workspace?
Thank you in advance for your insight.
Hi,
- Your end users will get 60 days of pro trial access, so they can continue to access your reports during that period.
- Longer term, you can plan to acquire pro licenses for your end users OR move your reports to you personal workspaces. Note that you cannot collaborate with other authors when your reports are in a personal workspace. You will need to the underlying PBIx file to move the reports from the group workspace to your personal workspace
Hope that helps.
Since launching our Power BI iniative in April of last year, this will be the fourth time our end-users have experienced an issue due to a change made by Microsoft without any forewarning on the change.
While I understand there was a need to fix the error in the Licensing logic, the only feedback I'd like to give the Power BI team is to communicate these types of changes in advance (i.e. email to affected organizations, Power BI blog and/or Community). This gives advance notice and also creditability to us power users who publish and share with the organization.
Overall, really pleased with the product and progress the team at Microsoft has made, but a little more communication in advance to releases on service / desktop would be appreciated.
Interesting discussion. A couple of additional thoughts.
--This explains why we were so darned confused in the beginning about what kind of licenses we needed. The documentation and the tool WERE in conflict. No wonder. Those are hours our team will never get back.
--It does raise the question of whether we were double-crossed. We sunk a lot of time and energy into working with a product at one price, and now we're going to have to pay a substantial price increase to keep using it. We naturally wonder whether the disconnect between what the tool would allow and what the documentation said was intentional.
--We have found Power BI to be glitchy, but we've been willing to put it up with it because the pricing model was so much better than Tableau's. We felt like we were supporting a well intentioned development team. When we have to buy everyone pro licenses, we'll be much less generous with our good will. I doubt we'll use the tool for the long term now.
--The pricing model may still work for small organizations looking to avoid large upfront costs. But they have to be pretty small.
--The idea that documentation should trump what the tool allows is ridiculous.
--The idea that a shared workspace is a pro feature is ridiculous. Collaboration is a requirement of tools like Power BI. You would not want it to be the domain of a single person!
Ajay, I hope the comments here are being fed back to management.
It was a very poor decision by Microsoft to suddenly require PRO licensing for consumers of Workgroups without appropriate change management.
1. Microsoft could have easily changed the policy wording to maintain the current status. This way, nobody would have been affected.
2. Can you imagine if an emergency services or a call centre was relying on Power Bi, and their reports were suddenly unavailable without explanation ? This happened to us on go live of a new project. We were running blind for a half a day and had to send 15 staff to observe the project instead of looking at the data.
3. As someone else mentioned, this change is a game changer. Tableau is now a cheaper option for large organisations. We can either spend $100k on Tableau or $1.2million on PowerBI p/yr to provide organisational access, which is COGNOS territory. Please rethink your pricing model. Perhaps consider concurrent licensing.
4. A 60 day trial for Power BI PRO is too short a time frame. Business cases for large organisations can take many months or even up to a year or more. It is not an option. We have had no choice but to republish all our dashboards to individual workspaces to ensure that all staff are catered for.
D
Hi Ajay,
Can someone please provide a response to this ? Surely the Licensing structure needs to be reveiwed urgently as you cannot leave existing customers that have built a Power BI ecosystem hanging without any workable/viable solution ?
I attended the recent Gartner conference and this was a major topic at the Microsoft Power BI stand. This topic is already the most popular topic on this forum. You can be assured there are thousands of customers that have not voiced their concerns but are just reading our posts.
Cheers,
D
Crickets
This is unaccepatable. As if the messaging from MS and Power BI wasn't confusing enough, you're now telling us that you "fixed" a bug that conflicted with the current wording of the Pro licensing. Shame on you. My org doesn't have the budget (since that closed last month) to upgrade our entire user base to Pro. Now we have to research non-MS solutions to avoid future "fixes".
Indeed we need the group workspace to work together on the dashboards as developers. It is the only way to back-up eachother in publishing the dashboards.
Now we have to crecreate them on our personal accounts and hope nothing goes wrong in our absense !
Please make a distinction between developing in PRO en consuming the reports. We are willing to pay for developers and super-users, but not for the whole company!
Also dishearted to see this fix go out. It will probably be a deal breaker for my organization as well as the costs to deploy to my group of thousands of employees will be significantly higher than competing software from Tableau or Qlik Sense.
Too bad.
What about using the Content Packs and letting people get access to the data that way?
I dont think Content Packs solves the basic issue of being able to update a report on behalf of an absent colleague, unless I'm missing something.
We used a PowerBI Group Workspace as a sort of "shared folder" in PowerBI Online where I e.g. could upload my .pbix report and share it to other collegaues within our organisation by pinning the Live Tiles to a dashboard.
But let's say I was ill or on vacation and my colleague needed to update this report on my behalf. He could then simply open the .pbix file on our local corporate drive, click Refresh in PowerBI Desktop and then publish it again to our Group Workspace overwriting the existing data online. The link would remain the same and no one would notice.
If I had instead published it to My Personal Workspace my colleague would need to open the local .pbix file, publish it to his Personal Workspace instead. Then create a new Dashboard on his Personal Workspace. Send out a new link to the hundreds or perhaps thousands of read-only end-users, while also informing the users to use this new link untill I get back where they then again should use the old link.
I would love to know if anyone knows a simpler solution to the use-case above. We've had our eye on Scheduled Refresh as well - but this is also a Pro-feature which would then require the hundreds of end-users to get a Pro-license...
This morning, in the Share functionality of the dashboard the Power Bi Pro message appears:
"This dashboard contains Power BI Pro content. Only users that have Power BI Pro will have access to it.Learn more"
Yesterday it was not there and also there was no changes made to the dashboard/dataset/refreshing options.
The users doesn'e seems to "feel" the consequences yet.
Are you aware of another changes in teh licensing?
Regards,
Hi Gabistoica,
You are correct. This is very concerning. I am sure it must be a mistake on Microsoft's part. If sharing is suddenly Power BI PRO content, then Power BI is as good as dead.
Ajay, can you please confirm why, all of a sudden, sharing Power BI dashboards even on my own workspace now requires Power BI PRO ? I can guarantee you that the dashboards do not contain PRO content.
Update: I can confirm that this is indeed an issue. I published a simple report into My Workspace and it cannot be shared.
D
I hade the same experience today. I do not have anything in my reports or dashboards that requires PRO. But PBI-Service still claims that I have PRO-content and that the users that I share with need a PRO-license. I have re-read the licensing setup over and over and can not see that a PRO-license is required. Especially since MS claim that nothing has changed in the licensing setup.
Now even tried to remove everything from service and upload it again (as this is a previous solution for a similar problem), but that does not help. Seems like all sharing is stopped for non-PRO.
But, after checking with a user it seems that sharing still works.
Has this topic's problems been on hold forever?
Hi Ajay,
Thanks for your update about the Pro Content dialog box.
I have a small doubt and curious to know why MS is implementing a pricing model where the users have to get a Pro License just to view the reports.
Please provide some update on the same, we are not looking for free solutions. But we are looking for a solution where it's mandatory for developer to pay and get Pro license and users can view for free like other platforms (Tableau).
Thanks
I am growing quite tired of waiting for a response. Even my Microsoft contacts agree that these licensing changes are not corporate friendly.
I created a new Idea regarding the licensing issue. If you would like to vote, please go here:
Cheers,
D
Ajay,
Do you have an status on this?
Hi Igor,
All the fixes have been deployed. So you should be able to see it in your tenant.
