Need help setting up correct Power Bi / Fabric account types

[bsullivan28]

We are small/mid-sized business and are looking for a simple way in the short term to be able to:

1. Create Power Bi reports using Power Bi Desktop 
2. Schedule the reports to autorefresh the data and autopublish out to the web service
3. Allow others in the organization to view the reports on the webservice via a link I send to them or schedule emails with the reports

What I'm currently doing:

1. Creating Power Bi reports using Power Bi Desktop
2. Manually refreshing data and publishing out to the web service (no ability to create automated refreshes and publishing I don't think)
3. Others in our organization are viewing the reports but when I publish I am getting a notification that my free Fabric trial will end in 14 days

I currently have a Power Bi Pro account and can get them for others in my organization if needed.

It looks like there are so many options and different accounts to buy and I would like to find the simplest, quickest, and most cost effective to meet our current needs.

Thanks for any help!

[ibarrau · Accepted solution]

Hi. I'm sorry I haven't seen tayloramy's answer when I posted this one. Tayloramy's explation is well better formated 🙂

A great small operation would be assigning a Power Bi Pro user for each user that will view a report and the developers. The developers should use Power Bi Desktop and publish the reports to a Created Workspace at Service (not the default "my workspace"). Once published to the workspace you can share the add users as viewers to the workspace if you want them to see all, share one by one the reports or create a Power Bi App to share groups of reports to specific audiences.

Once the report is published to service it creates a semantic model. That one is the one you should look for schedule refresh. If the data is in azure or common cloud sources you can just edit credentials to configure schedule. If it's on premise or in a local environment (VM), you will need a power bi on premise data gateway to create a bridge between the web and the data. You can configure the sources the gateway should read and the schedule the refresh.

The automated publish or deploy is the only tricky and complex step here. Once you have all the previous, then start thinking in a way to automatically deploy, but it's not that necessary if the data refreshes when you are getting started.

I hope that helps,

P/D if your operation is for more than 60 users, let us know, maybe there are alternatives for improving cost effectiveness

[tayloramy]

@ibarrau the number of times I go to post a reply and then see that you have posted one as I've been typing is comical. Glad I can be faster sometimes 😂

[tayloramy]

Hi @bsullivan28, 

Here’s the simplest, cost-effective setup for “build in Desktop > auto-refresh > share by link/email”:

• Licenses: Give every creator and viewer a Power BI Pro license. This is the cheapest secure sharing path. Feature matrix: Power BI service features by license type, end-user behaviors: Types of licenses for business users.
• Publish & share: Publish to a workspace (not My workspace) and release via a Power BI App: Publish an app. Sharing prerequisites: Collaborate and share content.
• Automated refresh: Configure Schedule refresh on the dataset (gateway if needed). No “auto-publish” required: Configure scheduled refresh, overview: Data refresh.
• Email subscriptions: Use Subscribe to send snapshots to your users: Email subscriptions.
• Trial warning: You likely used a Fabric trial capacity. Move the workspace to shared capacity (with PPU) or buy capacity before the trial ends: feature matrix.

Alternatives:

• Need viewers without Pro? Use a Premium/Fabric F64+ capacity so free users can view: What is Premium?.
• Small team wants Premium-like features but per-user: PPU (all viewers also need PPU): PPU FAQ.
• Public, no sign-in: Publish to web (not for internal data): Publish to web. Prefer secure embed: Embed securely.

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