- [Paul] Hello, and welcome to this video series
on the Power BI Adoption Framework,
which is about empowering every decision maker.
I'm Paul.
- [Manu] And I'm Manu.
- [Paul] And in this video, we will talk about
Power BI licensing.
There are two main parts to Power BI:
Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service.
Power BI Desktop is a free tool that lets you
ingest and transform data, build data models,
and create reports.
The Power BI Desktop file can be saved and published
to the Power BI service and then shared with others.
To consume content published to the Power BI service,
you need to be licensed,
either by having a Power BI Pro license
or by consuming content published
onto Power BI Premium capacity.
A Power BI Pro license is required for those users
publishing reports, sharing content,
and collaborating with colleagues in workspaces.
Power BI Premium provides a dedicated resource
for running reports and dashboards in the Power BI service
for your organization or your team,
giving you dependable performance and larger data volumes.
Content can also be embedded into SharePoint, Teams,
or a custom application using Power BI Premium
or Power BI Embedded.
Please see links below in the description
for more details on all of these options.
Power BI Premium is licensed by capacity
with dedicated resources from Microsoft
made available in the cloud as part of the Power BI service
for an organization's exclusive use.
This dedicated capacity can be applied
to a specific set of users against an intensive workload
or for other scenarios requiring heightened performance.
Power BI Premium also enables organizations
to extend BI access to a broad set of users
without the need to purchase individual seats for them.
With Power BI Premium, Power BI Pro users are able to
distribute dashboards, reports, and other content
within and outside the organization.
Power BI Premium also enables you to
embed content in other applications,
create larger data models,
and incrementally refresh your model.
You can also create paginated reports,
which are based on the Report Definition Language
in SQL Server Reporting Services.
Premium also includes Power BI Report Server,
which is an on-premises version
of Power BI with a web portal.
You can build your BI environments on-premises
and distribute reports behind your organization's firewall.
There are multiple ways to purchase a Power BI Pro license.
For individuals that have been assigned
an Office 365 E5 license,
a Power BI Pro license is included in the cost.
For users with an E1 or E3,
Power BI Pro can be purchased as an add-on.
You can purchase a Power BI Premium capacity node
through the Office 365 admin center
and can have any combination of Premium capacity SKUs
within your organization.
Power BI Premium includes Power BI Report Server,
and customers with SQL Server Enterprise Software Assurance
also have access to Power BI Report Server
as part of the Software Assurance benefit.
In this scenario, a firm has 10,000 employees
across multiple divisions.
Each division has their own BI goals
and associated licensing requirements
to achieve those goals.
A Finance team is actively working
to analyze several large datasets
in advance of an earnings announcement
and requires unthrottled and isolated capacity
to manage the workloads.
Because the Finance division has all of their 5,000
employees covered with Office 365 E5, they do not need to
purchase stand-alone Power BI Pro licenses.
With Power BI Premium, they can customize capacity
based on their unique needs.
They can purchase their own dedicated capacity
and control the users, the content they serve,
and their SLAs.
The HR division has already purchased Power BI Pro
standalone licenses for many of their users
and wants to extend read access to reports
throughout the organization.
The HR division purchases Power BI Premium
to extend read access to reports and dashboards
across their organization.
Power BI Premium includes Power BI Report Server,
extending hybrid capabilities,
including on-premises report publishing.
This way, the HR team can deploy and distribute
interactive Power BI reports completely within
the boundaries of their firewall.
The rest of the company does not have the requirement
for any of their employees
to create and publish BI at the moment.
No additional licenses are required
for the rest of the company,
and reading of published BI is covered in the existing
Power BI Premium purchases by the HR
and the Finance divisions.
What Power BI licenses do you currently have
in your organization?
We would recommend documenting your current licensing
but also to review the usage patterns for Power BI
in your organization that were documented previously.
You can then review what licenses you will need
to meet these requirements.
Do you have, or are you looking at purchasing,
Power BI Premium?
Based on the discussion in the previous slide,
are there reports with a larger number of consumers?
Do you need larger data models?
Or are you looking to benefit from some of the
additional functionality offered by Power BI Premium?
- [Manu] This and the next few slides
show some sample license assignment approaches.
For small organizations,
or organizations with a strong governance and control,
Power BI Pro license assignment for all users
may be the way to go.
And this can be done with PowerShell
to avoid a lot of manual work.
For most large customers, there's a need to ensure
that tool-specific guidance is in place.
So this is another potential workflow for license assignment
where everyone needs to watch a usage guideline video
that covers key governance concentrations
and organizational best practices.
The license can be programmatically assigned to the user
once they've watched the video.
Some customers believe that content authors
should be made aware of the usage guidelines,
and consumers of the content can potentially
be assigned licenses as soon as they're added
to an Office 365 group or an app workspace that hosts
a Power BI solution.
An optional introductory video can be made available
to those who are interested in getting familiar
with the technology.
This can even be a link
to a Microsoft training video on YouTube.
Power BI Premium could enable another workflow
where free licenses are assigned to everyone
so that anyone can consume content from Premium workspaces
as and when it's available.
The Pro license assignment workflow for the authors
can remain unchanged in this scenario.
License assignment is one of the most important
parts of your strategy.
And now that we've discussed a few options,
at this point, you should have a discussion
about how you will go about assigning Power BI licenses.
The three key options are:
You could either assign licenses to all users
at the time of release, or you can have a phased roll-out
where you assign licenses to all users over time.
Alternatively, you can follow an approach
where you are assigning licenses on request.
It's important to discuss the approval process as well.
We have included a link to the slides that we've used
in this presentation in the description below.
Thanks for listening, and if you have any
feedback or questions, please leave a comment below.
See you in the next one.