PowerBI and sharing with external clients - question about options

[juju]

I am evaluating the use of powerbi for a business use case.  I am a bit stumped by the sharing options available.

My company provides energy monitoring services. We will like to develop a dashboard that shows energy usage metrics - made available to each client.  The client has no editing rights - we are just using the dashboards as a reporting service.  All the clients will be external to our domain, of course. 

Our problem is how to share the dashboards -  Our dashboards will be streaming realtime info so we need a pro account. Seems PowerBI requires each client to register for a Pro account to just access and read these dashboards? That won't work for us.

What are my options if I still want to use PowerBI.  I am intruiged by DAX and all the flexibility that comes with using this tool.

What we know so far :

1. Pushing the dashboard into excel does not retain all the charts and interactivity ( not sure about this one )
2. Publishing the dashboard to a website ( secure website for each client ) still exposes the dashboard to the public - the url in this case is still public, in case anyone has access to it.
3. Clients can't use the free PowerBI service - just to read the dashboard. ( if it was created using the Pro license)

Did I miss anything else thats possible? 

[v-yuezhe-msft]

Hi @juju,

As stated in this article, if your dashboards and reports contain streaming data using Microsoft Power BI REST API or Microsoft Stream Analytics, then you will have the 10k rows/hour limitation.

However, in your scenario, if you load data from Excel file located in OneDrive for Business to Power BI, you are able to refresh the dataset Daily without gateway and you can share your dashboard with external clients those have free accounts. The external clients will be able to access reports in your dashboard.

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

[juju]

Hi Lydia:

A couple of followup questions for the csv/excel on OneDrive for Business or Sharepoint Online scenario:

1. How many csvs can I link to on Onedrive for Business or SharePoint online? Is there a limitation? What if I have a 100 clients and have one csv for each client  - to power their specific dashboard and also to get around the limitation of 10,000 rows/hour. What if i limited each clients csv to just under 10K rows but have one csv per client ?
2. Assuming I have one client with several energy usage dashboards ( there is a dashboard for each office location ). After using separate csvs for each dashboard, is it possible to consolidate several dashboards for one client with several locations? 

Thanks

[v-yuezhe-msft]

Hi @juju,

Based on this link, OneDrive for Business supports syncing over 20,000 files. For more details, please review this article. For other limitations and restrictions, please check this article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-sg/kb/3125202 . In your scenario, there is no 10k rows/hour limitation in Power BI as your dashboards and reports don’t contain streaming data using Microsoft Power BI REST API or Microsoft Stream Analytic.

In addition, we are not able to consolidate several dashboards with several locations.

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

[juju]

Lydia - this might work for us then. 

Finally, Is it possible to have a pro account, build a pro dashboard which streams data from an Azure mysql database or use directquery for live data, whilst at the same time, build some other dashboards which rely on the csv imports from sharepoint? In that case, all the dashboards ( csv and azure sql ) would have been built with a pro account. Can I still share the csv based dashboards with users on the free PowerBI account?

[v-yuezhe-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @juju,

Based on your description, you want to create some dashboards that contain Power BI Pro features and create other dashboards  that contain Power BI free features.

You want to share dashboards that contain Power BI free features to free users, if that is the case, it is possible.  However, if you want to share dashboards that contain Power BI Pro features to users, they would also need pro licenses.

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

[pousterhout]

This may have been answered, I apologize if so.  Can I share with someone at a different company?  So if I'm paul@kpiguy.com, can I share a report with Joe@someothername.com?

[Anonymous]

On Option 2, you might encode with, and filter on, some unique token for each client to help hide the URL.  But it seems that option won't work right now anyway - according to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-publish-to-web/, "the following are not currently supported or available with Publish to web...-Reports using real-time data sources"

[juju]

Steve:

Does changing our requirement for realtime streaming open up the options available to us?

If we switched to say, updating the data once a day - can we then use the free version to create our dashboards?  The data is currently sitting in MYSQL databases on AWS ( not redshift ).  Is it better to have it them on Azure instead?  We can also push some sort of csv file daily to a place where PowerBI can pickup easily.  Which option is preferable and more robust?  ( I am assuming these options are all doable under the free version)

I am looking for the best workflow to set things up to support perhaps a few 100 clients - each with their own dashboard.

A shame about Microsofts pricing model ( for people who just want to read/consume reports ). The requirement for a pro license to view a dashboard developed with pro features is a deal killer for many ... doesnt make sense.

[Anonymous]

@juju,

From my reading of the requirements for Power BI Pro at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-power-bi-pro-content-what-is-it/, slowing to daily updates will help, but you may still require Pro licences if you're using DirectQuery, a gateway, or reading more than 10,000 rows.

And my comment earlier on encoding a user token in a URL for Publish To Web was wrong - that's not supported right now.

I haven't worked with MySQL on AWS, so can't help with your options there, sorry.  One for the moderators or other experts...

[juju]

oh no - then PowerBI may not work at all for us. We will definitely have more than 10K rows to import. But we are not set on realtime updates. We can go to daily updates via a csv file. But if the 10k row limitation applies there, then we are done here.

[Anonymous]

@juju,

Again, I don't work for Microsoft - I've just given my reading of the page.  Over to one of the moderators or one of the experts in this area for a more considered opinion.