Need help in Power Bi Pricing and sharing options

[Manash27]

Dear Community,

Need help!

Kindly help in choosing the right package in terms of pricing and best option available for a small sized company

The company is about 1500+ and wants to move towards PBI. Since PBI is a self service BI tool, users want to build their own reports and share those within the organisation (70+ will use to develop their own report & 1430+ will only consume). 

High level requirement is
1) Customer preferably wants a On-Premise solution rather than a Cloud based solution.
2) Set of users should able to create and deploy the reports to consumers by their own without the help of IT.

3) Preferably visualise the reports in inhouse Intranet.

4) Power BI Pro for all the 1500+ users is not an option.

5) Currently a andful of 50 users have PBI pro lisence.

Kindly let me know if Power Bi Report Server will be best suited in terms of Pricing considering company donot have an SQL EE.

There are several pricing options available and not sure which will best suite based on the requirements.

Cheers

Manash

[Anonymous]

A mix of Pro and Premium is likely the solution you will land on.  The Pro licenses cover all of the users that need to develop & share.  The Premium license creates a capacity that will allow you to have your "free" users view any of the shared content.  Premium also comes with the ability to us "Power BI Embedded" which can be used to share your reports out to external clients. 

Power BI embeded isn't a completely IT hands off solution, as it would require some level of .NET development with a webpage.  You might have methods to minimise the IT requirements there.  Premium might allow you to share externally in other ways, but our company doesn't allow it.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/tag/external-sharing/

Premium also allows you to use the On-Premise version called Report Server.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/

[Manash27]

Thanks for the response Ross73312.

Considering the mix of Pro and Premium would also like to understand

1) how external users (Outside Company domain or the users who donot have a Office 365 email) can consume the reports shared by a Pro user?

2) Will it be feasible to embed the shared reports to a intranet site within the company.

Regards

Manash

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

For question 1:  Premium is what allows this to happen because the premium license is paying for a capacity which the users consume.  Think of it like you have purchased your own server for your exclusive use.  Since you pay for it, Microsoft doens't mind who in the Power BI eco system uses it as long as you authorize it.

For question 2:  There is a function in the Power BI service that lets you embed.  It provides you with the web code to copy and paste into your intranet.  Users still need to authorise themselves within Office 365.  Once the browser has that token, they are fine.  The report behind the embedded can be placed somewhere that all internal staff can access and the embeded passes it all through.  The website can then simply draw the Power BI report as a web part, passing that authorization token through.