Power BI licensing for multi-academy trust

[lukecarr]

What sort of licensing are people using for Power BI in a multi-academy trust setting?

 

We are looking at sharing reports internally amongst (hundreds of) staff, but can't really justify the price of a Power BI Pro license for every user. Our first idea was to simply anonymise all of our data and remove any PII, then publish to the web and embed on a custom web-app secured with a login. However, after some quick research, I stumbled across a Power BI Community discussion (https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/Restrict-Publish-to-Web-Functionality/td-p/134647) which explained that although the embed links are random, they are still indexed by search engines and so generally accessible to the public. Even with anonymous data, this method would not be suitable for us to use.

 

We are now looking at Power BI Embedded Analytics on Azure, which works out cheaper than provisioning Power BI Pro licenses for everyone (when using the cheapest 'A1' node). We would then use our internal software dev team to create a hosted web-app with a login system, and then display embedded reports based on user access rights.

 

I'd love to hear what other people are doing when it comes to Power BI, and, if you encountered the same licensing issues as we are currently experiencing, how you managed to circumvent them.

[knightrider]

DM sent

[TechMonkey]

Yes we did encounter the same issues, though not a MAT. We are keeping licenses to a minimum, so small group to test and then management so they can monitor dashboards. For sharing wider, the decision was to create PDF or PowerPoints, no need for interactive dashboards.

 

It is annoying, that to just consume dashboards you need a license and everywhere seems to say that Free users can consume, but what they mean is open content, not receive shared content. You would have thought the content creator would need a license and anyone wanting to repackage content. Very annoying.

[lukecarr]

Yes we did encounter the same issues, though not a MAT. We are keeping licenses to a minimum, so small group to test and then management so they can monitor dashboards. For sharing wider, the decision was to create PDF or PowerPoints, no need for interactive dashboards.

 

It is annoying, that to just consume dashboards you need a license and everywhere seems to say that Free users can consume, but what they mean is open content, not receive shared content. You would have thought the content creator would need a license and anyone wanting to repackage content. Very annoying.

 

Hmm, see our problem is the fact that, as a MAT, the current vision is for all staff, teaching and non-teaching, to be able to interactively view Power BI dashboards. And naturally, the emphasis is on interactively.

 

I think realistically the only outcome for me is going to finance with a very large quote!

 

Would still be interested to hear if anybody has come up with some creative ways to not buy Power BI Pro/Premium for 1k+ users across a MAT.

[bobsmith]

How does BromCom get around it, they use powerBI extensively AFAIK?