We have been consulting small & medium businesses (100 - 500 employees) on BI topics and recommended Power BI. Many are using the E3 O365 plan.
They are fine for paying for authors (Power BI Pro) but need to share dashboards with many users. For example, some of them publish important KPIs on the intranet landing page or on displays mounted throughout the company.
Since the announcement of June we know that this is no longer possible: Dashboard-consumers need PowerBI Pro or PowerBI Premium. The latter would cost about $ 5.000 per month for company with 100 employees. $60.000 per year?
This model is killing the product before it had a chance to grow. The idea that one needs a pro-license to share a dashboard is a total misconception: Creating and publishing dashboards ist not collaboration in the traditional meaning (like intranet communities, MS teams or Slack). Its like requiring a license fee for distributing PDFs or html pages in your organisation. If you pay fees for an content management system or html-editor, would you expect to pay for publishing and viewing your html-pages?
The O365 landscape is quite powerful but many users are completely overstrained by the collection of dozens of tools and different licenses. When should I use SharePoint, when Teams, when Delve, when Groups etc? One of the advantages and sales-poposition was that one can use so many tools with just one license.
Whith this Power-BI change MS is heading in the wrong direction: off-market use-cases and fees.
Users will find work-arounds: Use more agil and practical tools or simply render the Dashboards as images and publish them throughout their organisation.
Best
Mic
