Dominic Fraser on 29 Jul 2015 18:33:59
Right now, If I use PowerBI desktop to create a dataset, report and dashboard. I am not able to share it with a standard user. This effectively means that we have to either licence everyone as a pro (very expensive for 4k people), or not use the pro features at all (which isn't what we want).
Pro users should be able to build and schedule the PowerBI, and then be able to share with any company user using AD security groups.
Without these options the tool may not be a viable option...
- Comments (92)
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
I think this is going to put so many potential clients off using Power BI it could have had a great deal of user base expansion but with the cost of having to have a licence for everyone when you want to share anything of great use will certainly put a great many £££ user off even thinking about it as they will rule it out from a procurement perspective and there are a lot of government agencies that I am sure would have been interested in this as part of the Office 365 suite of tools
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
We are an organisation of approximately 1500 employees and 100 or so supervisor /director/executive/etc. I am an analyst who works in business governance in a team of four employees. We have to implement and operationalize the GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) business process.
Our team thinks that Power BI offers many interesting functions and possibilities to complete / improve our goals, especially to communicate and coordinate information in each department involved in the GRC domains.
But, like some others in this post, this is impossible for our team to justify the fees for the organisation (100 or so licences = approximately 15000 CND$/years).
Power BI is a real good tool and offers many opportunities, and like Bryant Schaper, our team are willing to pay a bit more for pro licence if users with a free license will be able to consume pro content (without modifying capabilities).
About "[...] I hope you can appreciate that it's also not feasible to support a case where for a single publisher at $10/user/month we support an unlimited # of free users.", I would argue that there exists some opportunities that you could consider. For example :
• All organisations need to think about "Business continuity": because if the user who has created the content with Power BI is no longer with the organization, this content is lost (cannot be managed by another user). To resolve this, we must create a group and put all content in. So, basically some licences are needed to ensure business continuity... not just one...
• There are many departments in our business. If we implement Power BI in our department, many other supervisor/director/executive in the organisation will probably be interested to exploit this tool for their own needs... Therefore, they will also want to acquire Pro licences.
Therefore, these aspects should be promoted in sales pitch...
We really hope this topic will be reopened and licensing plan reconsidered.
Best regards!
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
Haydn,
As I expressed to you personally, for almost every "Pro" scenario that doesn't have to be real time we can use Power BI Desktop to manually refresh and republish content daily. And that would be free for all. So the only person who benefits from the Pro license is the person who wants to automate refreshing of the data. That's why current model doesn't make any sense at _any_ price point. Even $1 to view the dashboards doesn't make sense.
I understand that you need to make money, etc., but this thread clearly demonstrates that this is the way to do it. Obviously we don't know your internal organizational business structure, but I would guess you can negotiate with Office 365 team to roll "Pro Viewer" licenses into Enterprise O365 plans or something.
Otherwise I just can't see how anyone could use Power BI Pro even if the absolute amounts are not as extreme as for some of the others posting here.
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
I understand you are independent, but I think the target audience is those people leveraging the Microsoft stack. Fair pricing is tough, unfortunately I cannot answer that for you, but I think the real value of the product is as an added service to the Microsoft product line. Even for our small company it is $2500 a month, and to be completely honest, it is not a feasible. While Power Bi has many nice features, it is not as robust as other solutions that do not have a $30,000/year price tag. They might be expensive, but they are in most cases much less to purchase and have a small annual maintenance fee.
Power Bi has promise, but I think it will not last as a paid service and will eventually be free or rolled into the Azure platform. The numbers just don't pencil to me.
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
Thanks Bryant. We absolutely agree that for the most part end users will not be generating content. We also agree that generating a dashboard for yourself is a limited scenario. The whole point of the service is to host content for users to consume. I think the whole crux of this is what is reasonable on a per user basis. It is true that we could charge more for authoring but the reality is there are so few authors compared to the number of consumers that it’s probably not worth it and it’s easier to have a single, simple flat price for all users. We’re actually an independent team from SharePoint Online and we’re thinking only of the value we can create for our users.
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
Thank you, Haydn Richardoson for your information about this issue.
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
Hi All - I really appreciate all the honest and passionate feedback. I think at the end of the day it's a matter of the value we deliver and the total cost of the solution to you. Many of you are providing clear feedback that for your use case $10 x # users is not workable. I hope you can appreciate that it's also not feasible to support a case where for a single publisher at $10/user/month we support an unlimited # of free users. There is volume discounting available today so for larger user counts the price comes down. That being said I know a number of your are also in smaller organizations.
Our original intent here was to make content creation free to make it as easy as possible to create content of value. That's one of the reasons the Power BI Desktop is free. We chose to build our business on the consumption of content of value, with a single simple price for all users. Perhaps we shouldn't have called it Pro because it creates a perception that it's for Pro or Power Users but really it's just the price for any paid user. Some of you are saying that price is too high for broad use. We're listening and taking that into consideration.
The free offer was intended primarily as a way for individuals to try our service to see what it was capable of doing and to do this over a limited set of data (uploaded files and connections to SaaS services).
Fundamentally our licensing is based on the capabilities of the consuming user, regardless of who created or published the content.
Users with a free license will be able to consume content
•they personally connect to using out of the box solutions for Dynamics, Salesforce, and SendGrid etc
•they personally import from files like Excel workbooks
•is shared with them that does not leverage Power BI Pro features
as long as the total size of all the data they are bringing to their workspace is < 1GB
Free users will not be able to consume content which leverages paid features including:
•Content which is scheduled to be
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
Haydn,
Thanks for the feedback. However I still feel like the Power BI team is missing the big picture. End users will for the most part not be generating any content, as you can see from the posts, it is falling to technical staff, and on that same line, who is really going to generate a dashboard for just themselves. How worthless is that. The whole point of a dashboard is to present data to people in an easy to consume format.
I don't think anyone on the forum expects it to be free, we just expect it to be reasonable. Only your team knows that value based on how many licenses you may have sold, but I would be honest in saying that I probably could not cost justify anything more than a couple dollars to have the ability to view pro content. That said, I may be willing to pay a bit more to author pro content in that model.
This to me just seems like a scam job to fix a problem with sharepoint online not being able to access external content, so power bi exists to do so, but we are going to charge you even more. What a hum. SharePoint Online/Office 365 was sold as a cloud service so you don't have to host internally, but I am still amazed at the shortcomings of features that have been stripped out. It is more like sharepoint services than SharePoint.
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
Recreating this ticket as a copy of the same wording. This issue is limiting our adoption of Power BI company wide, and the longer it persists, the more difficult "selling Power BI" internally will be. at a 50% markup on Office365, it's too expensive to make my entire company (11k users) all Power BI users. MS -> respond to this please.
RE: Share a Pro dashboard with a standard user
Haydn,
Not sure why this was declined, or at least from a revenue standpoint I understand why.
But I think MS is missing the big picture, most businesses are never going to use the product is they have to license everyone with Pro. It is completely useless to say that pro users can share none pro content with standard users. Who would want that. The feature set of pro is what everyone wants to use, standard features are just to scaled back to make the product viable. We will continue to use other options until MS decides this product is a failure and revamps the licensing.