Power BI Premium Sharing

[TheOckieMofo]

Hello Power BI Community,

I'm perplexed with the sharing capabilities of Power BI Premium. My org recently purchased Power BI Premium; however, we have been piloting PBI for about a year and already have 4 enterprise wide dashboards out there that were shared under the old free user model (All dashboards are hitting SSAS cubes via an import into a .pbix file that is then uploaded to PBI Service). Now, we are trying to transition to the new model. I've configured the PBI Premium node using the "Guy in a Cube" video and added my workspace to the Premium capacity. This workspace is where I built the 4 dashboards. This workspace also has been assigned a pro license. Unfortunately, when I shared one of the existing dashboards with a new user, they received an error stating they need to upgrade to pro. So what did I do wrong? Can you only share apps via PBI Premium? I was under the impression that you could share individual dashboards via PBI Premium.

Again, to nutshell it:

1. Company has ~180 users on PBI

2. Company has 20 Pro Licenses

3. From one of the workspaces with the pro licenses, 4 dashbaords have been shared with the entire org

4. Company recently purchased PBI Premium

5. Added the above referenced Pro workspace where the dashboards were created to PBI premium

6. Attempted to share existing dashboard with a new user and it gave me an error stating the new user needed a pro license.

So, again, community I am asking for your guidance. What am I missing?

[Greg_Deckler]

This is pretty new functionality so it's not necessarily 100% clear yet. Adding myself to this thread out of curiousity.

[ap · Accepted solution]

We ran into the same problem as well.

This got escalated to the engineering team as we got to Severity level A? (I assume that's extra important)

Product group said yes, you should be able to share if you move your workspace to premium capacity. However, after talking to the developer directly, this is intentional. Sharing your workspace is a Pro feature and is not Premium.

If you want to have others consume your data, you must publish it as an app. This is super confusing when reading the online documentation. The whole Premium model was based upon that you had a set of Pro licenses that create, edit and share reports. The Frequent and Occasional users consumed the dashboards and reports.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-admin-premium-manage/

They need to update this document and say explicitly as even Microsoft frontline support thought sharing was available to my workspace. Add a bullet point that says, "my workspace cannot be shared without Pro license for reader and creator" or something to that matter.

1.Items within a Premium capacity
•App readers can be Free or Pro users.
•Sharing requires a Pro license.
•REST APIs for embedding utilize a service account, with a Pro license, rather than a user.

2.My workspace in Shared capacity
•Sharing requires a Pro license.

3.App workspaces in Shared capacity
•Any app usage requires Pro licenses

[TheOckieMofo]

I'm going to accept this as the solution. From reading the white paper on Power BI Premium, that's my understanding that you can only share apps via Premium. Anything in "My Workspace" cannot be shared, only the items in an app workspace that is then ultimately published as an app.

I would also agree that this is not very clear at all. If I have to dig through a white paper to find the answer, that's not very transparent (it's the first paragraph on page 7 of the white BTW in case anyone wants to go back and check my work).

Finally, was there any way to copy something from "my workspace" directly into an app workspace? From what I can tell, if you create a dashboard in the "my workspace" portion of the PBI Service, you then cannot just simply copy that dashboard to an app workspace and move on with your life. You have to recreate the wheel if you want to do that. I hope I'm missing something there, but I don't seem to be.