The Power BI web part is now a part of SharePoint online for the majority of Office 365 users. This web part allows Power BI reports to be embedded on SharePoint pages, putting them in greater context. These web parts are rendered on the client, not on the server like old style web parts, which means that they are rendered by the consuming user, not the server. This means that in order for the report to render properly, the user needs to not only have access to the report, but also needs to be licensed for it.
The Power BI web part is a feature that requires a Pro license for both producers and consumers. This actually makes sense given that any sharing features in Power BI require Pro. Also, given that the consuming user must have access to the report, the report will be contained in a Group workspace, and Group workspaces themselves require a Pro license. So, what happens when a non Pro user opens a SharePoint page containing a Power BI web part report?
Quite simply, the content doesn’t show up.
Premium Capacity
However, on June 1, 2017, the premium pricing model for Power BI became available. Premium allows organizations to purchase premium capacity in the service. When reports are deployed to this premium capacity, users can access these reports without a Pro license. The act of publishing the report still requires a Pro license, but viewing it does not. Therefore, the Pro requirement for the web part goes away if the report is deployed to premium capacity.
This is in fact how it works. To date, I have seen no official announcement or post from Microsoft on this topic. The closest thing is a response to a forum post in the Power BI community forums:
“If the if the user that is trying to consume the embedded report does not have a Power BI Pro license but is part of a Power BI Premium instance, same viewer rights apply meaning that the user can view the report but collaboration features such as Analyze from Excel are not available, in line with regular Power BI Premium related features.”
The bottom line is that in most cases, all users, both producers and consumers will need a Power BI Pro license to be able to use the Power BI web part. The only time that this is not the case is when an organization has purchased premium capacity, and the report is deployed to that capacity. In that case, only the producer requires a Pro license. It should also be noted that in this case, some features (like export data) will still not be available to the free users.
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