Power BI free/Pro and using Office 365

[Chrisp22o]

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 make it available for everyone within the company would we need the Power BI Pro licence or is there any other additional costs associated with using Office 365?  I would also like to explore the possibility of having a dashboard linking to a 365 Group so that teams can see their own set of data further down the line.

I would wish to take advantage of having real-time data within our Power BI dashboards and the data source would be an ODBC connection to a Progress database.   I gather it would not be possible for me as an administrator to have a Pro licence and have the data publish to our Office 365 environment and all employees to use the free version?

If anyone can please provide any further clarification or advice that would be appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Chris

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

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]

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