Microsoft offers several models for licensing Power BI.
For product vendors, these operate in different ways:
- The Power BI Pro licensing model requires users to view reports using the Power BI portal. This means users need to leave the context of sharedo, and that discreet reporting components cannot be embedded into blades or widgets. This model requires that all users (both internal and external users) that need access to report data to have been allocated a Power BI Pro license.
- The Power BI Embedded licensing model allows reports to be seamlessly added into pages and components of the application and removes the need to manage the licenses allocated to internal and external users. In order to serve reports to users without Power BI Pro licenses, this model requires that a dedicated Power BI Embedded Capacity is created as an Azure resource.
Each of these models allows users access to the sharedo core reports and for users to design and add their own reports to the sharedo workspace. The sharedo configuration also provides the ability to link to other workspaces within the enterprise. This is commonly used to provide a portal based access point for reports across the organisation.
Within sharedo, customers can choose to use either the Power BI Pro licensing model, or the Power BI Embedded model. There are disadvantages to using the Power BI Pro licensing model in sharedo.
- Selecting reports will open these in new browser tabs, within the Microsoft Power BI portal experience. Users will need to navigate from sharedo
- The sharedo core reports security filter data based on the sharedo user identity. By moving to a separate tab window our core reports can no longer provide these security filters. This means users using our core reports in this model will see the entire dataset.
Sharedo has taken the decision to adopt the Power BI Embedded model. This provides an improved user experience for reporting and removes the management and allocation of licenses, which for external (client) users can be especially complex.