Starting a new tenant--Power BI Pro with Office 365

[AgeOfEgos]

I've searched and most of the information is a bit dated.  We are starting a small company (only 2 employees) that will be taking data from Excel and other various sources for small businesses and publishing them to Power BI.

Not every organization we interact with will have O365 (most won't).  So thoughts are;

Start a professional tenant in our business name

Develop workspaces for individual clients

Purchase Power BI liceneses per customer and assign security to workspaces as appropriate

The licenses would be in our tenant name and hosted on 'our' Power BI Pro site (so multiple gateways feeding multiple workspaces)

Where I'm stuck is figuring out what the heck it requires for a Power BI Pro license assignment.  Do we literally just buy an 8 dollar a month Office 365 subscription to make a new tenant such as 'newbusiness.org' and then start purchasing individual power bi licenses from the O365 admin portal?  Is there a document that lists out the steps?  thanks.

[v-robertq-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi, 

According to your description, you don’t have a starting domain/tenant and you want to assign Power BI Pro licenses to your employees, I think you can follow my steps:

1. Follow this document to create an Azure Active Directory tenant to use with Power BI:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/create-an-azure-active-directory-tenant

2. Follow this document to purchase and assign Power BI Pro user licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin center and Azure portal to users within your tenant:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-admin-purchasing-power-bi-pro

3. If you want to manage and view the Power BI user licenses within your tenant, you can follow this link:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-admin-manage-licenses

Thank you very much!

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _Robert Qin

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[TomMartens]

Hey @AgeOfEgos ,

unfortunately,  I can't provide a link to a document that explains how to start a new Power BI tenant.

Basically, it's that simple

• just buy your first Power BI Pro license
• visit https://app.powerbi.com
• login with your M365 (aka O365) account, if you are already using M365, e.g., for onedrive, you are ready to go

If you currently do not have any M365 subscriptions, things are more complicated. As you have to consider if you want to "attach" your domain with your M365 subscription, but how to do this is beyond my experience. I always had the luck that there had been a M365 Administration account in place 😉

Hopefully, this will help to tackle your challenge.

Regards,

Tom

[AgeOfEgos]

If you currently do not have any M365 subscriptions, things are more complicated. As you have to consider if you want to "attach" your domain with your M365 subscription, but how to do this is beyond my experience. I always had the luck that there had been a M365 Administration account in place

That is my situation--I'm unsure how to proceed if I don't have a starting domain/tenant.