Forum Discussion
Impactful Individualnew power bi licensing
Hi dilumd
Here are my answers to your questions
- Going forward you will have to have Power BI Pro to share dashboards. If you use the Free Version you are still able to publish to the Power BI Service, but you will not be able to share it with anyone.
- Going forward if you want to share the recipients of your dashboards will have to have the Pro or Premium licensing enabled.
- Under free they are going to give it the same capabilites as the Pro version, with one BIG change that there will be no sharing.
- For any access to viewing other peoples dashboards you will require the Pro or Premium licenses.
You can find more details here for the licensing
So this means that if you have 5 people developing PBI Reports and Dashboards and 95+ who just Consume reports that refresh Daily and/or don't use any of the sexy things that apparently PBI Pro offers ( https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-power-bi-pro-content-what-is-it/ ), you would now be paying $50 US per month but after June 1 you would have to pay $1000+ per month :-) ... even if you never use today's Power BI Pro features.
Simple math and kinda sucks frankly ... Good luck selling that to management ;-)
**bleep**
Helper IIHi GilbertQ,
Forgive me, but I am still confused. I am a Pro user, and have created several reports and dashboards which I share throughout my organization of 50+ users. Do these users, who simply view my content, have to be Pro users as well? They are not making edits to the content, they are simply viewing the content that I have developed.
Thanks for the clarification!
Advocate IIYes you are right ... $10 per person or $500+ per month :-) Great eh?
I have decided that there is ONE solution, and although I have kept it to myself until now, I think it might be time to mention it....
More than one person can log into a single Power BI account at a time ... So why not get ONE Pro account for each selected Group of your Viewers (it might be everyone so you may only need one) and share it and its password to everyone that will consume your Dashboards and Reports...
YES this was not how this was intended BUT frankly I really think MS's theory is that EVERYONE will be so busy creating their own Reports and Dashboards that they won't be able to to their actual jobs ;-) ... so they will NEED their own login.... Not true
A developer with their own Pro sub can then Share their content to the Group Pro license or licenses so they can consume the reports and dashboards. The Group account can be assigned only View rights by the Source account user and they can be prevented from changing, printing passing on the assigned docs.
The one thing that will always come up with this is the fact that any of the Group account users can add their own stuff to the Account. Simple solution though ... have the Admin go in and delete anything added periodically (like daily) and declare adding stuff to this account is a BCM (Bad Career Move)...
I know MS might try to declare this against the contract we have in a Pro license (but I don't see this anywhere) but nonetheless these Group accounts would be exclusively Viewing platforms and their demand on Power BI' processing and especially it's storage would be nothing at all.
We all know that logins and passwords are shared between co-workers EVERYWHERE for genuine reasons of keeping their business moving along, so this is not an outrageous idea. Also I do not think this is a security issue because any individual Licensee can always share their private Login and Password with anyone anytime, so what's the difference.
Also at any time an Administrator can change the login Password for a Group account and redistribute the new one to the list of acceptable Viewers. And of course if everything is created from PBIX files there will be backups of the Content always there if some a-hole changes the password themselves (which should be the last thing they ever do for your company ;-) )..
And since there are already many people who use their logins on different machines all the time and already share their logins I think if MS shut this down it would be politically unpleasant.
Then maybe MS would just come up with some cheap Viewer License (say $2 per Month?)...
Have fun with this ...
**bleep**
- mmace1
According to the moderator here, this solution (having multiple people share a Pro login, for the purposes of viewing dashboards only), is fine:
mbegg
mmace1 wrote:According to the moderator here, this solution (having multiple people share a Pro login, for the purposes of viewing dashboards only), is fine:
mmace1 just be aware that (a) you can't implement row level security & (b) you can't stop sharing a dashboard with someone & (c) if someone leaves your organisation, can they continue to login (unless you change the password)?
- mmace1
Thanks, yes I'd throught of those downsides as well! Most of it is negated because this particular data - really isn't very sensitive.
b.) The inability to stop sharing is fine
c.) I'd throught of people leaving the organization, yet still being able to login. For us, we could either 1.) As with shared mailboxes, a manager enters the password the first time - thus the user never knows it or 2.) What I'd actually advocate - the data for this shared dash is not sensitive, so I would just leave it. Worst case change the password post-problem(s).
a.) Row level security - a bummer, but still falls under "this data isn't sensitive", so there's nothing we'd bother to restrict anyway. The way this data is currently shared - everyone can see everything, and that's actually the point.
- mmace1
>More than one person can log into a single Power BI account at a time ... So why not get ONE Pro account for each selected Group of your Viewers (it might be everyone so you may only need one) and share it and its password to everyone that will consume your Dashboards and Reports...
This was my first thought as well.
I posted a question about it in the "service" forum on Friday (I actually hadn't read your post at that point - I have to imagine a *lot* of people have had the same thought). No response yet...
I'm also not concerned about any single user messing up the shared acount - it's not hard for people to understand to not do that. Similar to how people (usually) don't mess up shared email accounts, etc.
Hopefully this is a workaround, or they change their pricing yet again. This change means Power BI rollout just went on hold at my company.
This is the same solution to our issue that we came up with. I am wondering if you have had luck using this technique? If so, would you recommend it for a smaller company?
- mmace1
Sorry, we still haven't implemented this particular dashboard, so we haven't tested it.
- alexSPY
We decided it was best to simply issue each user a pro license until we can move all of our services into Azure. Overall cost is negligable compared to the BI value we get out of the service.
- GilbertQ
Super User
That is a good idea, and glad that you can see the value in the Power BI Service.
