Power BI to users without Power BI

Question

So I've asked a similar question, but I thought I'd ask it more generally to get as many ideas as possible.

I have Power BI Pro. I am tasked with creating reports for hundreds of recipients, each one personalized to that specific user.

My organization will not pay out for everyone else to have Power BI enabled, although everyone will have an O365 account.

How do I share my reports created in Power BI to users without Power BI? Factoring in there are several hundred of them to produce every week by a team of 2 people.

Thanks in advance!

Ceaseless

Answer 1

Right here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-how-to-collaborate-distribute-dashboards-reports

it says

You need a Power BI Pro license to share your content, and those you share it with do too, or the content needs to be in a workspace in a Premium capacity.

But you can always just share the .pbix file locally. This doesn't use PowerBI.Com at all so you can do what you want. You should just be aware that you won't get a lot of the features like security etc.

That's the licencing terms of using Power BI. No way around it. Anything that works around this violates licencing.

Going by your other question.... you don't even need Power BI - you just want a bunch of static PDF's split by department! There are many ways to build a low cost reporting solution that spawns out PDF's, for example SSRS.

Power BI is really not the right tool for operational reporting, even though many people try to shoehorn it into that function. Think outside the square!

As per my comment below, the other way to share reports with non pro users is to buy premium capacity. This only becomes cost effective at high numbers of users though.

Laundes

Is there any way, other than sharing the .pibx file locally, to share reports to external users if they do not have pro or premium licenses? – Matadi

@Matadi Do they want interactive reports or static reports? If they want the Power BI interactive experience, the only other way is to buy premium capacity. If you need more information please create a new question with your unique constriants and requirements... so it can be closed as not suitable for this site :) – Laundes

Answer 2

Well you can use embed feature of powerbi. Powerbi offers api to get reports and dashboards from your account. You can call the api to get reports and dashboards,embed them in your own application and even store the report id and dashboard id in your database. Then share those reports and dashboards among your users via your own application.

Gull

Answer 3

If your users has Office 365 accounts, you can enable their free Power BI accounts, so they aren't "without Power BI" exactly. Sharing reports is Power BI Pro feature, though (i.e. it is paid).

I see couple of options you have.

1) The poor's man solution is to prepare 100's of one page reports (one for each user) with your Pro account and subscribe yourself to those reports. Then create rules in your Office 365 account to forward these e-mails to the appropriate user. You can look at the subject of these e-mails to get the name of the report. This will be a bit cumbersome to manage, but it is almost for free. The problem here is the "one page" part. In the e-mail you will get a screenshot of the first report section only and a link to the actual report (for which your colleagues will need Pro accounts).

2) You can write an application implementing "app own data" scenario. This means that you will use your Pro account as "master account" to access the reports, but you will authenticate your users (and decide which reports they can see) in another way. This can be a web or a desktop application. Choose what is more appropriate for you.

Maccarone

Thank you Andrey, I really appreciate you answer. Can you elaborate on option 2 a little more for me please? – Ceaseless

Thank you, Phil! In SO you can express your appreciation by upvoting/accepting people's answers :) – Maccarone

Answer 4

Our company uses the Power BI Report Server. If your company already has a SQL Server Enterprise license or above, then you already have it, no additional costs. Works great, you can create SSRS and Power BI reports, deploy to your server.

Javanese

Answer 5

PowerBI Report Server https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/

This uses SSRS to serve up web based PowerBI reports. SSRS is a great platform and is very flexible. You would also have support for the other SSRS reports (Paginated and Mobile Reports). I'm not sure what the licensing cost would be for your organization but I hear it's pretty steep.

My understanding is that you would need a Pro license for report writers but clients do not need a Pro license.

I agree with @Nick.McDermaid, there usually is a better solution out there but executives LOVE PowerBI ;)

Limbus

should the business not be empowered to just do their own analysis. Punching out 100-200 reports a week between 2 developers is a LOT of work unless you have a lot of standardization; metrics wanted (provided they are all coming from one source) . And then there is story to tell cases. All I'm saying is NOT enough time among other things. SSRS is very well suited if above cases are met. Many ppl thing newer tools like Power Bi / tableau are magic bullets. They are NOT. – Hyper

Answer 6

Well you can create the embed code in Microsoft Power BI service and can distribute this link to different users. But there is one exception, if you have implemented row level security in your reports it will not be shown in the embed code. If you want to show the reports with the row level security you need to use the Power BI embedding process. In this process you create your own dashboard in any language and then embed the reports from Power BI service into your own dashboard and in the dashboard users can see their reports. You can visit this link

https://www.loginworks.com/blogs/how-to-embed-power-bi-reports-into-your-application-using-power-bi-rest-apis/

Government

Answer 7

If you have O365 and use Teams or SharePoint, you can use Power BI embedded (The EM Version is purchased via O365). This will allow you to host the power bi reports in Team, and allocate 'free' users to be able to read the reports. The Pro license would only be needed for report developers. In this blog post it shows the differences in the SKU's and the number of equivalent Pro licenses to the cost of the service

https://jlsql.blog/2018/01/30/power-bi-embedded-sku-differences-and-cost-breakdowns/

So for the EM1 SKU, the cost per month (£470) is about the same as 63 Power BI Pro licenses, so if you had 100 Power BI users then it would save you the cost of the other 37. But, the SKU's have less Memory and CPU power so you do have to be careful and monitor the Embedded function.

Splashboard

Answer 8

Answer Is as simple as it can be however I have a following condition and if that answer is yes then I can help you without an issue.

Condition - All report have same database as backend

Solution -

Yes, you can create a single database that can update multiple Power BI files in different folders. However, the refresh will only affect one file. This is called an external dataset. External datasets are a way to share data between multiple Power BI files. When you create an external dataset, you add a reference to a data source in one file. Other files can use that reference to connect to the same data source.

To create an external dataset, follow these steps:

Open the Power BI Desktop file that contains the data source you want to share.

In the Power BI Desktop ribbon, click Data > Get Data.

Select the data source you want to share.

In the External Tables dialog box, select the tables or views you want to share.

Click OK.

Once you have created an external dataset, you can use it in other Power BI files by following these steps:

Open the Power BI Desktop file you want to use the external dataset in.

In the Power BI Desktop ribbon, click Data > External Tables.

Select the external dataset you want to use.

Click on Add.

The External dataset will be added to the Data pane in the Power BI Desktop file. You can then use the External dataset data to create reports and dashboards.

To refresh the data in the External dataset, you only need to refresh the file that contains the external dataset. The other files that use the External dataset will automatically be updated.

You can create multiple files and save it in folders that can be used keep 100 in 1 folder and setup an Report alert to sent to people required and power BI deliver it as a report. This is one time activity and if done correctly can solve your issue. Following link will help with alerts service-set-data-alerts end-user-alerts

Insusceptible

Answer 9

This is not a secure solution so it's a risk that users can get to other users' data with knowledge of power bi.

Embed the report feeding it the user/filter options based on the authenticated user and filter that way. This way users don't have to have a power bi pro account but still get the benefit of Power BI. I have done this before despite my telling the client this is NOT secure. I haven't worked in PBI in a while so things may have changed

Pascia

Answer 10

You could use microsoft sharepoint to share the BI vision. My organization doesn't buy eveyone BI licences. They instead share the BI via sharepoint. Check it out here

Tullis