Power BI Premium Usage Questions

[Lorenz33]

Our company will aquire Power BI Premium within this week.

A couple of quick questions:

1. One of the features of Power BI Premium is that a license is not required to view reports. This is desirable when wanting to make the Power BI reports accessible to the general public. We have a team that wants to use Power BI Premium in order to make the reports viewable to various groups outside of the company. However, they want to put security on it so they can allow only permitted people access to the report. Within our company, security is implemented through AD Users and AD Groups. However, users outside our company are not in our AD groups. How do we implement the security for only allowing specific individuals access to the Power BI report?

2. When giving an outside user access to the report, do we just send the URL to them?

3. Power BI Premium has extra features such as Advanced AI, XMLA endpoint read/write connectivity, Dataflows, Datamart creation. However, the local version of Power BI Desktop used to create the reports and then upload them is the same whehter it is Pro or Premium. How do we get access to these extra features? Do we have to create the reports on the Power BI Service to utilzie these features?

[edhans · Accepted solution]

Your understanding is incorrect. Everyone requires a Power BI license for Premium workspaces on the commercial cloud. Gov't is different for other reasons.

But, for all viewers, you assign a Power BI Free license, so there is no cost, but no license, no access.

To share with external user see this. Distribute content to external guest users with Azure AD B2B - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

You can still create public URLs for everyone to see, but that is everyone with no security, so great for public facing dashboards, but not for company data of any kind.

Your publishing via PBIX upload to the service remains the same. The XMLA Endpoint allows you to edit those datasets in the cloud. I have some models that are massive (many hundreds of million records) so the PBIX was published long ago, and all future changes are with Tabular Editor. We only use Power BI Desktop for the report connected to the live dataset (a live connection) and that file is a few hundred KB in size.
As for dataflows, datamarts, etc, that is all 100% in the service. You can access them with Power BI Desktop, but you create them in the workspace, same as with Pro workspaces. Power BI Desktop is only for model creation and report creation, not these other artifacts.

[Lorenz33]

Thank you. So to add external users we will first need to add them as guests in the Azure AD. The extra features (AI, Machine Learning, Data Marts, etc.) are utilized within the service.

What is the procedure for creating public URLs for everyone to see?

[edhans]

Publish to web from Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn will show you how to publish to the web, but I cannot stress enough, this is NOT SECURE BY DESIGN.

As soon as you publish, your URL will be captured by search engines and there are a lot of reports there people think their URL is "secure" because it is about 50 jibberish characters, and it isn't. So make sure this is data you truly want the public to see.