A longtime user of Power BI, Workplace Options employs Microsoft’s solution extensively across its 12 internal teams. The company wanted to manage and share Power BI reports and Dashboards with clients, but integrating third-party users in their Azure Active Directory was the only way to do it on Power BI Free.
“We’ve been using Power BI for a long time, but we’ve always had issues managing clients that were not in our active directory.”
– Amit Sarkar, Director of Client Reporting and Business Analytics at Workplace Options
Due to its cost, the capacity-based Power BI Premium wasn’t a feasible solution, so the company provided a Power BI Pro license to each client with whom they needed to share reports. At $9.99/ per user per month, Power BI Pro was an expensive endeavor, made worse by the fact that sharing was the only Pro features Workplace Options clients were taking advantage of – they were only interested in viewing the reports, not working on them. The escalating operational costs forced the company to look for a solution elsewhere.