What is Power BI

Power BI is a powerful business analytics tool developed by Microsoft. It empowers organizations to visualize and share insights from their data in a user-friendly and interactive manner. With Power BI, users can connect to a wide range of data sources, including databases, cloud services, and online platforms, to create interactive reports and dashboards. It offers a variety of visualization options, advanced analytics capabilities, and integration with other Microsoft products such as Excel and Azure. Power BI is widely used across industries for data analysis, decision-making, and business intelligence purposes.

Power BI consists of several key components that work together to provide a comprehensive business intelligence solution:

• Power BI Desktop: This is a desktop application used to create reports and dashboards. It offers a wide range of data connectors, data transformation tools, and visualization options.

• Power BI Service (or Power BI online): This is a cloud-based service where reports and dashboards created in Power BI Desktop can be published, shared, and managed. It provides collaboration features, data governance, and content distribution capabilities.

• Power BI Mobile Apps: These are mobile applications available for iOS, Android, and Windows devices. They allow users to view and interact with Power BI reports and dashboards on the go.

• Power BI Gateway: This is a data integration tool that allows on-premises data sources to connect securely to the Power BI Service. It enables scheduled data refresh and live connectivity to on-premises data sources.

• Power BI Report Server: This is an on-premises report server that allows organizations to host and manage Power BI reports and dashboards within their own infrastructure. It offers similar functionality to the Power BI Service but is deployed locally.

• Power BI Embedded: This is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that allows developers to embed Power BI reports and dashboards directly into custom applications or websites.

These components work together to enable data connectivity, data modeling, report creation, sharing, and consumption within the Power BI ecosystem.

What you can do in the Power BI service depends on three things:

• the type of license and subscription you're using

• where content is stored, and

• the roles and permissions you're assigned.

Each user of the Power BI service has either a free license, a Pro license, or a Premium per-user license.

• A Business User is generally granted Free license.

• Power BI Premium Capacity License - Premium is an organizational subscription that provides a different way to store content--in a virtual container called a capacity.

• With Premium capacity, anyone with permissions, whether they're inside or outside your organization, can view content stored in this Premium capacity, without purchasing individual Power BI Pro or Premium per-user licenses.

• Within those workspaces, designers assign roles, like Viewer, Contributor, Member, and Administrator.

These roles determine the extent to which colleagues can interact with the content.

Subscription

The important distinction to understand about licenses is that there are:

Licenses that apply to an individual (per-user) and

• a license (often also referred to as a subscription) that applies to the type of storage capacity that an organization purchases

Which type of license you need is determined by where your content is stored, how you'll interact with that content, and if that content uses Premium features.

There are 3 types of per-user license – 1) Free, 2) Pro and 3) Premier Per User (PPU)

• Users with free licenses can use the Power BI service to connect to data and create reports and dashboards for their own use. They can't use the Power BI sharing or collaborating features with others; or publish content to other people's workspaces.

• PPU and Pro users with access to a Power BI Premium capacity-based license, can create content in workspaces that are assigned to Premium capacity.

• PPU and Pro users can then grant colleagues, including free users, access to those Premium workspaces.

• When you combine the features and capabilities of each type of per-user license with the use of a Premium capacity, that is where Pro, PPU, and free license holders gain access to additional features and capabilities - such as sharing, collaboration, and more.

Business Users and Designers

• Business users, by definition, consume data created by others and use that data to make business decisions. So, Business Users use free licenses.

  
  

• Designers (Pro or Premium users) can share their contents with others, generally Business Users.

  
  

• Business users are given free access to content

  
  

• Users with free licenses can use the Power BI service to connect to data and create reports and dashboards for their own use. They can't use the Power BI sharing or collaborating features with others, or publish content to other people's workspaces.

  
  

• Pro and PPU users can share content and collaborate with free users if the content is saved in workspaces hosted in Premium capacity.

Workspace

• Workspaces contain all the content for a specific app.

• When a designer creates an app, they bundle together all the content that is necessary for that app to be utilized and grants access to other users including Free users.

• Content may include dashboards, reports, and datasets.

• Commonly, app workspaces shared with business users don't include the datasets.

• When granting access to a workspace, designers add individuals or groups to one of the workspace roles: Viewer, Member, Contributor, or Admin.

• Business users typically interact in workspaces using the Viewer role.

• The Viewer role lets you view and interact with content (dashboards, reports, apps) created by others and shared with you. And because the Viewer role can't access the underlying dataset, it's a safe way to interact with content and not have to worry that you'll "hurt" the underlying data.

• Often, business users work with a free license.

• If the content isn't stored in Premium capacity, the business user won't have access.

• If the workspace is stored in Premium capacity, business users will be able to view and interact with the content in that workspace.

  
  

Security

• Power BI was built to provide industry-leading complete and hermetic protection for data.

• The product has earned the highest security classifications available in the industry, and today many national security agencies, financial institutions, and health care providers entrust it with their most sensitive information.

• How do we control who can connect, where they connect from, and how they connect? How can we control the connections?

• How is the data stored? How is it encrypted? What controls do I have on my data?

• How do I control and protect my sensitive data? How do I ensure this data cannot leak outside the organization?

• How do I audit who conducts what operations? How do I react quickly if there's suspicious activity on the service?

Disclaimer: The information shared in this blog may or may not be accurate and current. Please refer to Microsoft Support team before taking any business decision about using Power BI.