Sharing dashboards requirements.

[martinl]

Hi All

Thanks for being out there in the world of Power BI.

I have been looking at this for a while now and have downloaded POWER BI in order to recreate some of my Excel based dashboards.

I need to share with you some of my concerns and maybe you can tell me if I am misunderstanding anything.

To create a Power BI Dashboard you can download a free copy of PowerBI Desktop

                This will allow you to create a dashboard for personal use only as long as you have an acceptable Microsoft business email address.

Here I found that my company did not have a Microsoft business email account but this has since been recified with the compnany moving over to Office365.

Anyway that aside I have eventually got this sorted out – took a few months.

So now I can build dashboards and share them with myself – great

Actually that’s fairly useless – why would I want to build a dashboard only I can use.

So I went to see my Communications and servicing team – after having a video conference with them – they are not based in the UK, I have been advised by them that in order to share power BI dashboards internally or externally they need to purchase BI Premium at a cost of between €3.8k and €15.2k per month depending on the service plan.

Is this really the case and does everyone who I need to share my dashboards with need to do this?

Is there no way to share dashboards and reports without doing this.

I must admit I thought that once I could build a report I could share it with anyone regardless of them having power BI as it was web based. So anyone with a link could open it and use it.

Or have I got it so wrong.

What are the basic needs in order to share a dashboard written in POWER BI

What are the basic needs for someone to be able to open a shared dashboard /report.

totally confused

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@martinl I'll spin this a bit differently with the basics.

In order for sharing to work, and for end users to consume shared content, the base level is a Pro license. This is the basic requirement. Said another way, in order to share, both the report author and end user need to be licensed.

Premium, can be looked at as an add-on. A Pro license is still required for the report author, but the premium license covers free users so they do not need to have their own Pro license. Essentially, the "add-on" is covering the free users.

Alternatively, you mention that your company is moving over to O365. If they purchase E5 licenses, those include a Pro license in that so all users would be covered.

There are other side options in terms of Embedded, or on premises solutions with the Power BI report server, but those don't seem to be relevant to this post.. yet.

[deepu299]

@martinl Hi, 

That's right, To share reports/dashboards users need to have a license. This is where Microsoft pricing comes into picture. When purchasing License, you have 2 options to chose: BI Pro and Free. Pro users will be able to create apps and content and share to others. Free users will not be able to read the reports you publish. For free users to be able to read, microsoft sells Premium Capacity based on your requirement so both Pro and Free users can be tagged under it. Once all the users are in Premium Capacity, Pro users can share and Free users can read. 

Power BI desktop is absolutely free. Power BI Service is not free of cost, it is hosted in Azure and a license is involved. I think Power BI is cheaper than most of the similar BI Products in the market. 

Read this to understand the needs: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-pro-power-bi-premium-flexibility-to-choose-the-lic...