License to Access Sites.PowerBI.com

[Greg_Esres]

In the Office 365 Admin, I see two types of licenses I can assign a user:

1. Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 Add-On for Faculty
2. Power BI (free)

When I assign users #2, they cannot access Sites.PowerBI.com in order to view the reports I've created. When I give them license #1, they can. I would think that the free license should allow users to view content without being able to create it. License #1 costs some amount of $$ and, right now, we only have two of them. Do we really need to pay for a license for every user that wants to view PowerBI reports?

[Greg_Deckler]

2 is for Power BI 2.0, the first is for the older Power BI 1.0 site.

[Greg_Esres]

Ok, I'm totally screwed up...there's so much conflicting information on the web. Our CIO is a former Microsoft guy and he initially told me that Power BI is essentially Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, etc, add-ins inside of Excel, yet now I read "No more Excel add-ins (because it has proven to be hard to evolve), so a new dedicated tool was created Power Bi Designer. Microsoft committed to evolve this tool every month!"

So is Power BI Designer the way to go now? And is the only way to share reports via the Dashboard on the Power BI site? If yes, then how can we consolidate the reports generated by multiple people in a company-wide location?

Edit:  Content Pack?

Edit #2: Ok, I see...groups.

[andre · Accepted solution]

When people talk about Power BI, they generally talk about the following four things:

1. Power BI components deployed in Excel (Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View).  Depending on the version of Excel, these components are either baked in like in Excel 2013 or can be downloaded or not available, like Power View in Excel 2010.  Office 16 has these components baked in.
2. Power BI Add-in for Office 365.  This is sometimes called "old" Power BI.  It is still available as a part of Office 365 but it does not have any new features that have been released recently
3. app.powerbi.com or sometimes referred to as Power BI Service.  This is the new Power BI platform that no longer requires Office 365 subscription
4. Power BI Desktop - a new modeling tool that includes all of the power bi elements for data acquisition, modeling and visualization. 

Few things to consider...

Microsoft announced a new SKU - E5, that will bundle Power BI license with the Office license.  What that mean with respect to integrated experience between PowerBI.com and Office 365 is still unclear.

Power BI Desktop is definitely the go to tool moving forward.

Please see the link below on collaboration options:

http://businessintelligist.com/2015/07/27/the-definitive-guide-on-collaboration-in-power-bi-tutorial...

[Greg_Esres]

Great link, thank you.

I created a group and that generally does what I had hoped. One problem is that you can't share group dashboards, nor can you add a non-compay user to the members. That is an important limitation. I see on the suggestion site that one of the top complaints is the inability to share a dashboard outside the organization.

[andre]

yes, hopefully sharing outside of the organization and embedding will be available soon.