network file share), then the limitations on functionality for published reports mentioned above do not apply. Many users will feel more at ease with Excel than with any other tool. This is an important factor that should not be ignored. Best Practices for Report Design in Power BI Desktop It is beyond the scope of this whitepaper to go into detail on best practices for report design in Power BI Desktop. Entire books have been written on the subject of creating and optimizing DAX calculations, for example. However, it is possible to offer some simple tips and tricks that will make your reports as responsive and easy to manage as possible. Managing Report Authorship Controls over who builds reports, where these reports are published, and how many reports are published, are essential if you are going to avoid thorny issues later on in your project. If you allow unrestricted report authorship you will find that duplicate reports and datasets are created, and this in turn means that: Maintenance of reports becomes time-consuming and difficult, for example when data sources change or calculations need to be altered. You reach the limits for how much data a user can publish using a Power BI Pro subscription, or even the available memory of your Power BI Premium capacity, more quickly. Scheduled refresh for large numbers of reports at the same time can put excess load on data sources, making both the data sources and the report refresh slow. Different data modeling decisions, variations in how calculations are defined, and even inconsistent column and measure names, mean that users have difficulty comparing the data displayed in different reports and are unsure which reports to trust. This is not a recommendation to centralize all report authorship in the IT department because that diminishes many of the beneficial aspects of self-service BI. However, it is important to ensure that: All report authors are properly trained. Report authors follow your organization’s documented best practices and standards when building reports. Duplicate reports and datasets are avoided. Reports are thoroughly tested before they are published. Reports always have owners who are responsible for maintaining them, and answering questions, after they have been published. Many of these considerations relate more to the ‘process’ and ‘people’ side of the equation, rather than ‘technology.’ The whitepaper discusses many of these aspects.
Recap of terms: Collaboration is associated to multi-person content creation within an App Workspace. Sharing is associated with the individual report and dashboard sharing feature in Power BI. Distribution is associated with the ability to publish Apps from an App Workspace or the ability to embed content in portals or collaboration applications. Sharing and Distribution with External Users Using Azure B2B It is also possible to share dashboards, reports and to distribute using Apps with users outside your organization through . When you share or distribute with an external user a guest user account is created in Azure Active Directory and this allows users to sign in to Power BI to view your content using their own email address (either a corporate email account of a consumer email account such as Outlook.com). This is useful in scenarios where you need to make content available to customers and partner organizations. At the time of writing, there are several restrictions on functionality with content that is shared to external users, notably that: External users cannot consume content through the Power BI mobile apps. External users will not see content shared from external organizations when they login to their own organization’s Power BI Service portal. External users cannot edit content shared with them. An external user who possesses a Power BI Pro license from their own organization can use the Power BI Pro license level to access content in external organizations. This ‘bring your own license approach’ decreases total cost of collaboration across organizations which all utilize Power BI Pro. If an external users does not have a Power BI Pro license, they can be granted a license by the organization which hosts the content, allowing the user to directly access content in an App workspace that is not in a Premium capacity. However, those external users still will not be able to edit content in the App workspace. To enable editing of content by external users, it is necessary to issue them login credentials to your organization and provision them with a Power BI Pro license. A Power BI administrator can turn off external sharing, or limit it to specific users or groups, in the Power BI Admin Portal. It is strongly recommended this option
Applicable To Total v-cores Power BI Premium EM1 or Azure Power BI Embedded A1 1 v-core Power BI Premium EM2 or Azure Power BI Embedded A2 2 v-cores Power BI Premium EM3 or Azure Power BI Embedded A3 4 v-cores Power BI Premium P1 or Azure Power BI Embedded A4 8 v-cores Power BI Premium P2 or Azure Power BI Embedded A5 16 v-cores Power BI Premium P3 or Azure Power BI Embedded A6 32 v-cores Concurrent Data Refreshes Per Premium Capacity Applicable To Concurrent Refresh Operations per Capacity Power BI Premium EM1 or Azure Power BI Embedded A1 1 Power BI Premium EM2 or Azure Power BI Embedded A2 2 Power BI Premium EM3 or Azure Power BI Embedded A3 3
Publish datasets and reports to Power BI Report Server Publish datasets and reports to Power BI Service via an API Publish to Web (public report distribution) Power BI Service: Create dashboards In My Workspace Save favorites In My Workspace Download reports In My Workspace Save as another report In My Workspace Persistent report filters In My Workspace Data alerts In My Workspace E-mail subscriptions (“subscribe”) Export data In My Workspace Export to PowerPoint In My Workspace Print current page In My Workspace Q&A natural language queries In My Workspace Quick Insights In My Workspace Dashboard performance inspector In My Workspace Maximum size of an imported dataset (non-Premium workspace) 1GB per file 1GB per file Row-level security (defined in Power BI Desktop) Maximum size of an imported dataset (Premium workspace) 10GB per file Maximum data storage quota (non-Premium workspace) 10GB per user 10GB per user Maximum data storage quota (Premium workspace) 100GB per capacity
Ability to distribute content from a Premium-backed workspace in the Power BI Service Yes No No Ability to utilize Power BI Report Server Yes No No User Authorization and Security: User authentication requirement Individual user identity is required One master service account Authentication referred to as "User owns data" "App owns data" User authentication managed by Power BI Custom application Row-level security available Yes Yes Free user licenses may be used for read-only users Yes N/A (Custom app manages all users) Pro user licenses required for Authors & editors, developer using REST APIs, tenant admin, capacity admin, capacity assignment users Master account, developer using REST APIs, tenant admin, capacity admin Consumer of content can log into Power BI Service Yes N/A (no access to the Power BI Service) N/A (no access to the Power BI Service) Billing, User Authorization, and Security: Where to purchase Office 365 Azure Billing interval Monthly (with pre-defined commitments) Hourly (no commitment) Ability to pause compute service + billing No Yes Elasticity; ability to scale up/down to handle workload Yes P1 - P5 SKUs Not intended to be scaled up/down frequently Yes EM1 - EM3 SKUs Not intended to be scaled up/down frequently Yes A1 - A6 SKUs Handling variable-level workloads via scalability is a major feature
Get Data Experience in the Power BI Service Connecting to databases or systems, via Get Data, in the Power BI Service is deprecated. The capabilities to connect to data, transform and clean data, as well as creation of a dataset, relationships, and calculations are all fully supported in Power BI Desktop. Azure Workspace Collections Azure Workspace Collections are deprecated, and should be to the replacement service, . Beginning , customers will actively begin to be blocked from utilizing Power BI Workspace Collections. Customers with an Enterprise Agreement signed before June 2017 will have until the end of that agreement to migrate to Power BI Embedded. Power BI CLI The Power BI command line interface (CLI), for managing workspace collections, is deprecated and no longer supported. Automation capabilities for Power BI can be invoked via or . Section 14. Getting Support from Microsoft and the Community It is inevitable that, at some point, you will encounter a problem that you do not know how to solve. The first thing you must do is determine the kind of problem you have, and once you have done that you can determine the appropriate course of action and who you can ask for help. Support and Help Power BI Support, Service Outages, and Degradations Although the Power BI Service is extremely reliable, there may be times when the Service is unavailable or certain features do not work as expected. The support page will tell you about any outages or degradations that Microsoft is currently aware of and the timelines for getting them resolved. You can also open a support ticket from this page, which is available to users with paid Power BI Pro licenses. Power BI Service: Power BI Embedded: Reporting Issues If you suspect that something is wrong with the Power BI Service and that Microsoft is unaware of the problem, or if you find a bug in Power BI Desktop, the place to report the problem is the Power BI Issues forum. Before you post, please search the forum to check whether someone else