PowerBI distribution and sharing
Spotlight: The PowerBI Service
Lately we have been getting a lot of questions surrounding licensing and release strategy in PowerBI. This guide should serve as an internal, quick reference manual. The following is a list of topics covered in this guide, each containing a summary of how it works and what the use case is.
Licensing
Who uses this?
Limitations
Who uses this?
Limitations
Who uses this?
Limitations
Who uses this?
Benefits of Premium
Future of Premium ( As of Oct 2020 )
Distribution
PowerBI Row Level Security
PowerBI Sharing reports and dashboards
PowerBI Workspaces
PowerBI App Distribution Strategy
Alternative Distributions
Teams
Mail
Publish to web
Publish to Sharepoint
PBI Embedded
Everything you need to know on the PBI licensing structure.
Overview of Licensing Structure:
> Link to the official documentation comparing PowerBI Pro to Premium<
There are at least five partners Microsoft is trying to reach with it’s licensing plan:
The Hobbyist / Evangelist ( PBI free )
The Small to Mid-Size business ( PowerBI Pro )
The Enterprise ( PBI Premium, on Premise, Embedded )
The Integrator ( Embedded )
The Power User ( PBI Per User Premium “PUP” )
Most users graduate from Free to Pro or Premium. However, there are some edge cases where you will need to use all sided of the licensing structure at some point in your PowerBI Solution’s lifecycle.
PowerBI Free:
Overview:
Without any sort of licensing in PowerBI, you get full access to all features in PowerBI Desktop and the PowerBI service with one glaring exception, sharing. PowerBI free is the full PowerBI designer experience. You can create fully realized reports for your Organization without spending a penny. This is a really great way for your Organization to save costs in the exploratory phase when choosing a BI software. However when it’s time to deploy your solution, you will need the sharing capabilities that are granted by upgrading your licensing to either Pro or Premium.
Because Free users cannot share content with other users, they only have access to their personal ‘My Workspace’. This ‘My Workspace’ is a personalized storage area for their account and does not facilitate acceptable distribution or collaboration.
Who uses PBI Free?
The average user of PowerBI Free will be checking for compatibility between the PBI style of reporting and their business logic.
Limitations:
In PowerBI Free, you do not have access to the most common business critical tools: The on Premise Data Gateway ( Enterprise level refreshing of your data ), Sharing, Versioning, Row Level Security, Exporting data, and Direct Query are all inaccessible.
We do not recommend using PBI free as your production deployment of PBI for any team larger than two people.
Without sharing capabilities is very difficult for any business to use. You can create fully function reports, however there are incredibly limited sharing capabilities.
There have been a few cases of very small teams all sharing a centralized BIADMIN account, however, we do not recommend using PBI free as your production deployment of PBI for any team larger than two people.
PowerBI Pro:
Overview:
Pro is the most common licensing strategy for PowerBI. At $10 USD per user per month, PowerBI Pro is very affordable. The price point makes it easy for early adopters to land and expand in to other departments. The flat structure means that there is seamless integration between other Pro users. When a Pro users publishes their report to the PowerBI service, they can immediately share that report or dataset with other Pro users. It’s important to note that while Free and Pro users can exist in the same organization, Free users CANNOT interact with content created by Pro users.
Pro users also have access to a proper release management tools, Workspaces & Apps. A Workspace will always predicate an App.
Workspaces:
Workspaces are generally a collection of similar items; you might have a Finance Workspace and an Operations Workspace. You can add collaborators to the workspace as viewers, contributors, members and administrators. The roles are as follows:
Viewers have read-only rights to the workspace.
Contributors can create / modify some content content and configure refresh settings on datasets. They also have all permissions from the previous role.
Members can publish / update apps, share distinct items to other pro users and create other members in a workspace. They also have all permissions from the previous role.
Administrators have full control of the workspace and can add / delete any kind of user. They also have all permissions from the previous role.
Apps:
Apps are packaged, published content from a workspace; they are the version control mechanism of PowerBI. After your content is ready for general consumption, you would publish that content as an ‘App’ from the workspace. Once published, the contents and structure of the App will remain untouched no matter what happens to the related workspace. New changes in the workspace will only take effect after those changes have been published. Apps can have a separate audience from the related workspace audience. A common strategy is having development, collaboration, and beta users in the workspace while giving consumers access to the App. This stops consumers from messing up production reports, and gives grace for testing reports in the workspace.
Because Apps can have split audiences and version control, this makes PowerBI Apps a tidy distribution method.
Who uses PBI Pro?
The average PowerBI Pro user is consuming content from other Pro users. 80% of all organizations using PowerBI, use PowerBI Pro for licensing.
Limitations:
There are very few limitations for PowerBI Pro users. Unless you need paginated reporting, datasets larger than 1GB or more than 8 refreshes on a single dataset in a day you will likely never need PowerBI premium.
We do recommend using PBI Pro as your production deployment of PBI for any team with fewer than 500 users.
PowerBI Pro is the industry standard for creating, distributing and consuming reports. PowerBI Pro is an enterprise deployment for every vertical.
PowerBI Embedded:
Overview:
Embedded is a niche PowerBI Premium deployment intended intended for custom applications and workflows. Embedded solves problems of mass licensing to consumers in third-party applications. Often PowerBI embedded is used in conjunction with one or two PowerBI Pro licenses, those Pro users are responsible for creating content that is distributed via the custom application. Embedded allows you to query, invoke RLS, and display reports via the PowerBI API. Because Embedded is a service, pricing starts at $1 an hour.
Playground:
You can utilize the Microsoft Embedded Playground to test how PowerBI Embedded works and what sort of features you have access to. With Embedded you have the option to:
Trigger RLS
Display / Hide the filter pane
Hotswap reports on a custom webpage
You can access the Embedded Playground here.
Who uses PBI Embedded?
Organizations with custom frontends, pre-existing applications or third-party integrations utilize PBI-E to distribute their reports to consumers of PBI reports.
Limitations:
Individual report creators are still required to be licensed with PowerBI Pro
Capacity bottlenecks
Custom portals are required for distribution
Row Level Security is the only PowerBI service feature embedded can take advantage of
Embedded is meant to be a true read only experience
PBI Embedded is THE solution for organizations that want to whitebox their PBI reporting. PBI-E is not a suitable solution for end users wanting to customize or create ad-hoc reporting. It’s important to keep an eye on your usage so users are not stuck waiting for page renders.
We do recommend using PBI Embedded as your production deployment of PBI for any organization using custom software as their frontend.
PowerBI Premium:
Overview:
PowerBI Premium is the highest ‘tier’ available; Premium unlocks additional refreshes, higher data storage limits, dedicated compute capacity, AI capabilities and effective unlimited, unmanaged licensing. The various ‘nodes’ of Premium only relate to licensed compute power. You can purchase more or less power based on the node you choose. Premium starts at ~$5,000, this means that it is not cost effective to move your organization to PBI-P while you have fewer than 500 users.
How does this impact users?
When you purchase PBI-P, you are purchasing a node. Nodes have a set amount of capacity that you can spread over your organizations and departments. This allows for situations where you break up your capacity- perhaps you want to give finance more compute power, and operations less. Regardless of how you spread your capacity, your entire organization is licensed as opposed to licensing individuals.
Who uses PBI Premium?
Organizations that need any of the following should consider upgrading to PowerBI Premium:
With more than 500 users
Paginated Reporting
Higher data set capacity
PowerBI On-Premise
All other features can be worked around.
Limitations:
There are not any licensing limitations with PBI-P.
Premium Roadmap:
As of November 2020, there will be a new licensing model for PBI-P, Per-User Licensing. Per-User Licensing will allow users to purchase Premium capabilities at a severe discount compared to the standard licensing costs.
Overview Distribution Tools:
In this section we’ll be looking at 9 tools in the PowerBI service and how they are used in enterprise deployments. The below writeups should follows as a light ‘Use-Case’, ‘When to Implement’ and ‘How-To’. Please refer to the PowerBI Enterprise Deployment Whitepaper or any of the other PBI Whitepapers for a more in-depth review. The topics below are as follows:
PowerBI Row Level Security
PowerBI Sharing reports and dashboards
PowerBI Workspaces
PowerBI App Distribution Strategy
Alternative Distributions
Teams
Mail
Publish to web
Publish to Sharepoint
PBI Embedded
Row Level Security:
Use-Case:
Hiding sensitive data from unauthorized users, while maintaining a single data model.
Data models serving Tiered Organizations ( CEO’s and floor employees using the same report )
The CEO want’s to see Gross Profit but we can’t share that with shop floor employees.
HR needs access to all confidential employee records, but employees can only see public data.
Sibling end users ( multiple vendors / partners using the same report )
A construction company wants to serve one report to their different contract owners, but Contract Owner A should only see their data and Contract Owner B should only see their data.
Employees in a department should only have access to their projects.
When to Implement:
Can be used to remove non relevant data from end users and hide sensitive information from prying eyes, all while
How To:
RLS is handled in two places, locally and in the service. You can think of RLS local as the place where the rules are set and RLS service as where the rules are enforced.
Under the modelling tab in PBI desktop, you can select ‘Mange roles’. Once in ‘Manage roles’ you can create new ‘Roles’. You can think of a ‘Role’ as a bucket of rules to be enforced. Those rules can by highly dynamic and respect the logged in user.
Example Roles:
Regional Sales Manager
This Role might have the rules of SalesTeam[Supervisor] = USERNAME()
Eastern US Operations
This Role might have the rules of Project[State] IN ( ‘NY’, ‘MI’, ‘RH’….. etc… ) && Project[Country] = ‘USA’
Non-Executive view
This Role might have the rules of ManualTable[SensitiveInfo] = ‘no’
Admin
This Role might have the rules of 1=1
Once defined in the desktop and published to the service, you can add users and groups to those roles:
Under more options on the dataset, select Security.
On each Role, add the appropriate users and or groups.
Sharing:
Use-Case:
Quick ad-hoc sharing of reports and dashboards between two users for ‘My Workspace’.
When to Implement:
Not for enterprise deployments, but great for quick work between power users or for small organizations.
How To:
On a specific report or dashboard, tap share and add a user to the prompt.
Workspaces:
Use-Case:
Any reports that are meant to be published to the organization should reside in a Workspace other than My Workspace. Workspaces are the first step in deploying any sort of shared content to your organization. You can collaborate on reports together from a shared workspace and publish out to other users when you are ready to release the content. ( 99% of the time, workspaces are not the method of sharing reports out, but rather the container. Content is distributed from a workspace as an App )
When to Implement:
Any time you want to release a report to more than one other users, you should use a new workspace to house that content.
How To:
Click on workspaces on the left, then choose ‘Create New Workspace’
Workspaces are generally a collection of similar items; you might have a Finance Workspace and an Operations Workspace. You can add collaborators to the workspace as viewers, contributors, members and administrators. The roles are as follows:
Viewers have read-only rights to the workspace.
Contributors can create / modify some content content and configure refresh settings on datasets. They also have all permissions from the previous role.
Members can publish / update apps, share distinct items to other pro users and create other members in a workspace. They also have all permissions from the previous role.
Administrators have full control of the workspace and can add / delete any kind of user. They also have all permissions from the previous role.
App Distribution:
Use-Case:
When you need to distribute versioned reports to your organization, Apps are the way to go. Any reports that are meant to be published to the organization should reside in a Workspace and be published as an App. You can set access permissions on a group and user level.
Once published the App will remain static regardless of changes made to the workspace, until the app is republished. This shields end users of the App from testing, workspace changes and new versions.
When to Implement:
Any time you want to release a report to more than one other users, you should use a new workspace to house that content.
How To:
From the app workspace:
Click Publish App
Verify details, content and distribution network
Publish to App and Share the link!
Alternative Distribution Methods:
There are a few other ways to consume your PowerBI reports, besides the PowerBI Service. All methods when implemented ‘Post App’ will respect Row Level Security (except for publish to web) and are fully interactive!
Teams
Quick access to report from inside Teams
Subscribe via Mail
Get scheduled updates to your mailbox
Publish to Sharepoint
Host your report in an Sharepoint Intranet
Publish to Web
Create a public, licenses-less link that anyone can access
Embedded
Host your report behind your own custom front end
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