I have created several reports at the office, but users with Pro licenses aty office are like 1 out of 15. Most of them are not interested in ever creating reports. I want to increase usage, but I don’t want to have them pay for 100 licenses when most people hace not jumped in yet.
Do you have any suggestions to have them see the reports without making internal data public?
I do remember that Sam and one of his guests on the podcast said that Power BI embedded made not much sense, and I’ve also heard about virtual machines and some services to allow access without the licenses. If anyone has implemented some solution, I would appreciate a chance to chat.
If you want them to be able to develop reports, there isn’t away around getting them all Pro Licenses. In order for them to see the reports, you will need to make the the reports public. The approach that I spoke about on the podcast with Sam is that I create the publish to web link (Which makes the data public), then embed that link inside of a website that someone created for me. Then when users login to the website, they click on the report(s) that I have given them access to by clicking on a button, and it opens a web page, but they do not see the actual web link on the browser that opens up.
I know this probably won’t resolve your situation, but that is how I got around the similar situation you are in. If you are that concerned about the data being public, then you are probably going to have to bite the bullet and get pro licenses for the ones who need to view the reports.
another work-around, although not ideal as you lose some function is that you could have a ‘shared’ login to PowerBi
we have several users who need only occasional access to reports on the service, and so have created a couple of email addresses in our tenant that aren’t assigned to a specific individual (an email like customer service would work well).
a Pro license was purchased for that email address, and the users needing occasional access all have the password (which is changed if one of them leaves the company).
But, you do lose some features when you do this:
users cannot set up email alerts (as they aren’t using their own email to login)
if they use any other Microsoft Online product (like Office 365) there might be confusion if someone saves the login to PowerBi.com (ex, they might be trying to do Excel work using the wrong login)
anything done to a report (filters, bookmarks, etc) will impact anyone with access to that login.
you won’t know which of the people with access to the shared login are actually getting into the report (could be one user 15 times, or 15 users one time each)
and finally 5. this is NOT what Microsoft intended with PowerBi, and at some point, I expect they will close this loophole. But for now, and for my company, this is the best solution we have come up with.
Honestly, for me it wasn’t a hard sell to my management. The key was finding the “killer app” that they couldn’t live without once they’d seen it. For us, that was real-time HR actions process tracking and real-time budget tracking.
For the former, we used to do those as weekly Excel reports, and the latter we would do once a month, since they took a team of financial analysts a long time each month to generate the individual divisional reports and then the overall office budget report.
Once the managers saw that they could come in the morning, see up-to-date data in each area, analyze and query the data on their own instantly without having to go back to an HR or financial specialist who might take hours or days to get back to them depending on the complexity of the question, the only question back to me was “how quickly can you get everyone licensed?”.
As part of this discussion, I also prepared a comparative cost analysis showing how much time and dollars would be saved each month by not having to manually crank the Excel reports. The time savings resulting greatly exceeded the licensing cost expenditures, making the decision a complete no-brainer.
I have created some good ones for finance and operations, But I yet must create reports for HR. I think I’ll go back with a good business case after testing my new reports with the users.
For my company, it wasn’t a possibility - we are a small shop, so PowerBI Premium just isn’t a logical option.
Even ‘selling’ them on the individual pro licenses has been a battle, what finally has sealed that deal is that I am able to combine data from different Sales systems, and provide a much broader overview of some key customers that we work with in more than one system.
Consider this the equivalent of a movie “teaser trailer”. One of the new directions we’re moving in is to develop coursework for members not just on technical areas (e.g., DAX, data modeling, Power Apps, etc.) but also “functional areas”, where we explore in depth how to use Power BI/Power Platform to increase efficiency and effectiveness in specific areas, such as financial management, HR, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, etc.
We are currently working out instructors and schedule for these functional area courses, but I am keen to take on the HR course as I have a lot of experience in that area and have built some applications that I think members will find quite useful as the foundation for their own HR tracking/reporting and analysis.
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But for now, and for my company, this is the best solution we have come up with.