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Chrisp22o's avatar
Chrisp22o
Frequent Visitor
10 years ago
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Power BI free/Pro and using Office 365

Hello,   I am currently looking at the free version of Power BI to develop a reporting dashboard.  We have recently migrated over to Office 365.  If I wanted to use Power BI within Office 365, to m...
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  • Greg_Deckler's avatar
    Greg_Deckler
    10 years ago

    If you create a report using Pro features (like using O365 groups and things like DirectQuery) then everyone that views it needs to have a Pro license. Technically, I think you can get around that by using the "Publish to Web" feature if all they need to do is view although not the most secure solution.

Greg_Deckler's avatar
Greg_Deckler
Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion
10 years ago

If you create a report using Pro features (like using O365 groups and things like DirectQuery) then everyone that views it needs to have a Pro license. Technically, I think you can get around that by using the "Publish to Web" feature if all they need to do is view although not the most secure solution.

trebgatte's avatar
trebgatte
Icon for Most Valuable Professional rankMost Valuable Professional
10 years ago

Say No to Publish to Web

Please don't use Publish to Web. Ever. Unless you are the Gates Foundation or some public service/government entity and need to publish the latest Zika stats publicly, just turn it off at the tenant level. I wish the Product team would consider NOT enabling this feature by default. It's a data exposure incident, waiting to happen.  It works by removing all security validation from your data model and can make your model available to be featured on a Data Gallery within PowerBI.com.

 

Going Pro

This question is one of the reasons why I had to add licensing and implementation planning to my Power BI Dashboards in One Day class. Once you use a Pro feature for any reason, everyone who consumes that data has to go Pro. Using on-prem data with a gateway will require Pro. Using content packs will require Pro. In your case, you can use Sharing to use the free license. I have a related blog post here on using the free license. A longer updated video version of this post is in the works and will be hosted at the Recordings link below.

 

E5 perhaps?

In these cases, I recommend my client look at the Office 365 E5 license. The E3 + Power BI Pro license is almost equal to the E5 license and you get a whole bunch of other stuff with the E5.

 

Treb Gatte | Business Solutions MVP | Power BI Recordings | @tgatte | Blog