Power BI in China

[lindab]

I understand that Power BI is not available in China, as well as a few other countries.  Does anyone have a suggestion/workaround for sharing info with team members located in those countries?  Thanks!

[haydnr · Accepted solution]

Power BI is not currently available for sale in China. If you are part of an organization that has purchased Power BI somewhere else in the world and happen to have users in China (e.g. employees travelling in China) they will be able to use the Power BI service delivered by the tenant hosted outside China. We hope to release Power BI in China in the future. We have no timing to share at this time.

[Anonymous]

I would like to jump on this as well. Our company is evaluating its BI strategy and China rollout will be a show stopper for us as well. Any update on release?

BTW. How can this issue be marked as solved when it clearly isn't.

[RomiK · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous@jamesdales@lindab@pacerhill

Hi,

I am happy to share that Power BI is available in China.

To download the app you can go to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/#more-store-options and selecet your prefered platform :

[AdamWilson]

There are two options for customers in China who want to use the Power BI service.

The Power BI service is independently operated and managed by 21Vianet for Chinese customers.  21Vianet stores Power BI service data in China, as per our trust center.  You can read more details and sign up here.

Alternatively, the Power BI service is available from Microsoft in our global, commercial cloud including local currency (CNY) pricing for Chinese customers.  Data is stored in the closest Power BI commercial cloud region based on tenant country which, at the time of writing, is the Asia Pacific region for customers with their tenant country set as China (see the trust center for details).

[mahimabedi]

Is it only mobile or is powerbi.com also available in china?

[haydnr]

Power BI is now available in China.

http://www.21vbluecloud.com/powerbi/

https://www.microsoft.com/china/ignite/2016/ (watch from 2:33:37 onwards)

[TePe]

So what does it mean "not available"? Is the service blocked? Does that mean that a dashboard I creat i.e. in Germany isn't visible to users in China even if they work for a German company?

[haydnr · Accepted solution]

Power BI is not currently available for sale in China. If you are part of an organization that has purchased Power BI somewhere else in the world and happen to have users in China (e.g. employees travelling in China) they will be able to use the Power BI service delivered by the tenant hosted outside China. We hope to release Power BI in China in the future. We have no timing to share at this time.

[kevhav]

Hi @haydnr, could you please elaborate a little more?

We have Office 365 E5 licenses, purchased in the US, and the "Power BI Pro" license is a component of an O365 E5 license. Our company also has locations, and users, in China.

We are planning to use Power BI, with Power BI Pro features. We would like for our users based in China to be able to access those reports in the Power BI service.

But we just discovered that we cannot assign an Office 365 E5 license to a user having region = China, unless we toggle off the "Power BI Pro" component license. Presumably, beacuse "Power BI Is not currently available for sale in China" -- right?

So, for now, how would a user based in China be able to use the Power BI service, to view reports/dashboards that I create here in the US (with Power BI Pro features)?

[haydnr]

They would need to select a location other than China. This is a limitation that we hope to remove by the end of this calendar year.

[jamesdales]

Hi

Is there any progress on removing the limitation? This is currently preventing a global rollout of Power BI for one of our clients. Changing the region of the user is not an option as this impacts export controls in other systems such as Dynamics.

Thanks

James

[haydnr]

Still on track to resolve this by the end of the calendar year. Please be patient.

[pacerhill]

Please can you share the expected release date, as our team in China cannot utilise Power BI Pro due to this restriction. They are looking at Qlikview as an alternative, which is a shame considering we have invested in E5 licensing.