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**
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**
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?