Set Up Power BI Licenses and Security for your Organization

Do you need to set up Power BI licenses and security for your organization? Whether you're a business owner or part of an IT department, it's important to make sure that your data is safe and accessible to the right people. In this blog post, we'll walk you through the steps necessary to get Power BI up and running in your organization. We'll also show you how to configure user permissions and establish security protocols. Let's get started!

Maybe you have created your first report by following our Power BI report walkthrough that you can find here. Once you have created your first series of Power BI reports the next thing that you want to do is push these Power BI data models securely to your Power BI service instance that can be accessed at https://app.powerbi.com.

By default if you are using the free trial enabled by Microsoft on the Power BI Service you will be able to publish reports to your workspaces if you log into Power BI Desktop and use the basic functionality. However, after a certain number of times of renewing the 30 day free trials this will time out and you will receive the error below and you will need to upgrade to Power BI pro.

See more in our article about Power BI Pro and Power Premium in our article here that describes pricing for each as well.

Another error that you could get on the Power BI Service side when logged in, is a prompt that could ask you to upgrade that looks like this. That is also how you know your Power BI free trials have run out. You will need to upgrade to Power BI Pro.

If your Power BI service instance is configured correctly then you anyone that clicks on your Power BI reports by clicking on the link for the Power BI service, the right views will appear for each user depending on whether he or she has access to your on premise hosted or Azure Active Directory instance.

First you are going to have to assign the roles to the users in your Active Directory. In order to be able to do this your admin on your Azure Active Directory or if you have on-premise O365 installed and Power BI enabled already then your admin there needs access to do this. See below for the link to do this on Azure AD.

Assign Azure AD roles to users - Azure Active Directory | Microsoft Docs

With the proper admin permissions on either the Azure Active Directory side through https://portal.azure.com or your installed on premise O365 active directories, you will be able to assign Power BI licenses to your users that are on your active directory domains. For O365 users Microsoft gives a minimum number of free licenses that you can assign immediately to your users one by one by navigating to each in the admin console. Same principle for Azure Active Directory in the Azure portal as well.