Power BI - Test environment

[nankerp]

I am going to do a course for 15 people. What is the best way to make a testenvironment in Power bi with  their one user , Onedrive and Power BI Service? Is it possible to make several testenvironment if I want to do a new course for a new group?

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@nankerp What type of training are you doing? Power BI end to end? Are they following along, or are you just demo'ing the product? Each user should bring their own license, or start up their own trial. Typically you would just centralize the data they need in an accessible web location that you would share with them...

[nankerp]

They are folowing me along. I give them excersises. They are sharing desktop with each other. They use onedrive. But the only source is Excelfiles or Power BI desktopfiles.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@nankerp The Power BI Desktop doesn't require a license, but if you start publishing to the Service I spose that is where your problem is. All our trainings have had the end user sign up on their own with a trial account. You shouldn't need to spin up your own test environment with test users for everyone. As long as you provide the data in a single location that they can download or access, and the users are on the Desktop version you want them on, then they should be fine. There are no trial or test environments you can spin up and down, likely because you need a bunch of Azure, Azure AD, and O365 components set up in order for Power BI to work end to end. 

[nankerp]

I need to simulate one organisation where they can share dashboard with each other. Everything is done in Power BI Service.

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@nankerp I'm going to assume you want to do end to end. There is no such thing as a demo or test environment. If you wanted to have them all play in the same space you could do the following (I don't know if this breaks any licensing).

Buy a random domain. Create a Power BI tenant using that domain. Have your one Pro User. Each class, you would create the number of user accounts neeeded (15 in this case) and sign those accounts up for a Pro Trail. During the class, each student would get one of the accounts you created and log in. This puts all your students in the same domain and you can simulate them all being in the same organization.

Change the passwords on the accounts after the class.

You could re-use the same accounts provided you do another class in 60 days, otherwise you would need to create a new set of accounts.