Power BI Licensing

[danielstucke]

Hi All,

 

Belatedly joined the Power BI fan club. It's great and I've built a wonderful little dashboard pulling data in from all over to help us monitor remote learning provision.

 

I've now hit a snag as I'm trying to share it. I've bought 3 licenses for Pro hoping that would be enough and we could share the reports to staff who have free licenses. But having spent hours looking at it I'm starting to fear that you need either a very expensive Premium account for the whole domain, or Pro accounts for all users even if just viewing as an app or via Sharepoint?

 

Am I right in thinking this?

 

Thanks

[DaveTheTech]

Power BI licensing for users in your organization - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

The above reads as though any one can create a report. But to share it you need to have a pro licence - which is what you have.

[danielstucke]

Thanks, it does, until you realise it falls in this column:

Additional capabilities when workspace is in Premium capacity

 

And the 'premium capability' is a snip at from $5000pa per domain

[RootsSchImp]

Hi @danielstucke - I'm afraid in order to share both the sharer and the receiver need a power BI pro licence. If you want to get round this and continue without spending anything more the options are:

 

-Publish the same file separately to many free accounts - could maybe use powershell to automate this process - annoying for you if not tho.

-Publish to a generic free account and get users to all log into it: this will get annoying because sooner rather than later MS will force one of them to change the pw

-Create a report with no individual level data and use the publish to web feature (possible for governors/trust users who have responsibility for school but limited use for interventions)

-Put the desktop file on sharepoint for people to access: seems like it would be incredibly annoying for me but I've heard of schools doing this

 

None of these are great I'm afraid - might be better to take a cold look at who is going to provide value for money with access and get pro licences for them

 

Good luck - let us know if you come up with a better workaround

 

Ed

[davidpott]

Hi Daniel,

 

You will need a Power BI Pro license everyone you want to share the reports with. RootsSchImp is correct with the alternatives, but given the low cost of the Power BI Pro licenses, I would recommend that any school buys a Power BI pro license for each member of the senior leadership team. Schools only pay £1.70 per user per month for these liceses, so even if there are 10 people in your SLT, it's still less per month than my mobile phone contract. And the benefits far outweigh the price!

Edited February 9, 2021 by davidpott

[danielstucke]

Thanks @davidpott and @RootsSchImp - that's what I thought and your confirmation saves me reading more oblique MS support pages!

 

I'll sort some Pro licenses out for our Senior/Pastoral team and wind back my grand plans for dashboards for all teaching staff

[Damon]

It's such a shame that Microsoft create a decent product then limit it's use through licensing. One of the IT Managers I work with is impressed with Power BI but can't justify the expense when SSRS is doing the job with more affordable licensing (in his case).

 

A couple of points to add, to what's already been said:

 

If you have an O365 Tenancy you can create accounts that don't have password expiry enabled so the single account option is less problematic. However, I still wouldn't advise it as you're giving someone complete access to the report editing and the entire dataset.

 

Lastly, you can go down the route of having a third party platform gather the data present dashboards. I think Groupcall, Wonde and Bromcom have such a service but I think the latter are the only one that actually allow you to host your own custom Power BI dashboards within the interface, without the need for pro licensing. Essentially, in the background it connects to an account of your choice and streams the dashboards to the users within the platform. At least that way you wouldn't have to limit your plans for it.

 

I've set this up in some SIMS schools and it's working well. I've also got some schools where one user accesses the Power BI report template in the Desktop Editor and then creates a report for the rest of the school. In some ways that misses the point of the interactivity aspect but at least this means the author can direct people right to the issues.

[davidpott]

I was using Bromcom MAT Vision with a group of schools last month and was impressed. I willhave to investigate Bromcom's ability to host Power BI reports without need the pro license. Is it a Power BI Embedded thing @Damon? Edited February 9, 2021 by davidpott

[Edu-IT]

I was using Bromcom MAT Vision with a group of schools last month and was impressed. I willhave to investigate Bromcom's ability to host Power BI reports without need the pro license. Is it a Power BI Embedded thing @Damon?

This implies you do need a Pro licence?

 

http://support.bromcom.com/UploadedFiles/Other/PowerBI_Installation_Bromcom_MAT_Vision_Analytics.pdf

[gh5000]

Just going to say that Google Data Studio is included with their Edu domains. It might be an option if you're already setup with Google (O365 SSO for example)

 

It's not as powerful as Bi to be sure but it isn't far behind.

[DanSears]

If you are using the Bromcom Vison product to aggregate the data across your trust you only need to buy one Power BI Pro Licence if you want to use the provided BI Apps that Bromcom has developed. This can then be used with the built-in BI Viewer and shared with your configured Vision Users.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/217217-vision-x-fab-offering-if-your-looking-reporting-powerbi-across-mat.html

Edited February 10, 2021 by DanSears

[Damon]

I was using Bromcom MAT Vision with a group of schools last month and was impressed. I willhave to investigate Bromcom's ability to host Power BI reports without need the pro license. Is it a Power BI Embedded thing @Damon?

 

Yeah it's only possible as the viewer is embedded within the platform. A way to describe it is like Bromcom is logging in to an account on your behalf each time. Then you get to see whatever content is on that account. So by uploading reports to that account you're not technically sharing with other Power BI accounts, so there's no need for a pro license.

[Damon]

This implies you do need a Pro licence?

 

http://support.bromcom.com/UploadedFiles/Other/PowerBI_Installation_Bromcom_MAT_Vision_Analytics.pdf

 

This is where it gets confusing! So if you want to use their pre built app content you need one Pro license as you can't install power bi apps with a free license. But if like the OP or me you like to create your own, there's no need to upgrade to Pro. Hopefully my last reply to David explains why.

 

@gh5000 that data studio sounds interesting, cheers for the tip!