With the announcement of the Microsoft Power BI Embedded service, we now have another exciting Power BI solution to help you build Business Intelligence solutions with the best and most impactful data visualizations to enable your users to do more with data. In this article we’ll walk you through when to use each Power BI offer. 

We want to make it as simple as possible to make Power BI available to your users.  As a result, the decision on which technology to use is based on your target users:

• Users in your organization

• Customers that purchase a multi-tenant application you’ve built

• Anonymous users on the internet

The following blog describes which Power BI offering to use for your target users.

Users in your organization

If you’re building a business intelligence app for your organization, users can access Power BI either with:

In all of these cases, your users will need to be signed up for Power BI and  sign-in with an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account.  Details on the Power BI service and the functionality available for Free vs. needing a Power BI Pro license can be found here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/. 

Here’s how the Power BI service will look for your users:

Customers that purchase a multi-tenant application you’ve built

If you’re building a multi-tenant application, the Microsoft Power BI Embedded service is for you. Power BI Embedded enables ISV application developers to embed stunning, fully interactive reports into your apps without the time and expense of having to build your own controls from the ground-up.  The Power BI Embedded service allows you to:

• Continue using your existing authentication and authorization solution for your application end-users – you’ll use App Tokens to authenticate users with our service. Azure Active Directory is not required

• Pay for what you use. The Power BI Embedded service is an Azure based service and we will start billing on May 1 based on a “render”. See the FAQ for more details on billing.

Power BI Embedded is an Azure service.  You can learn more about the Power BI Embedded service, App Tokens, learn how to get started and everything else you need here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/power-bi-embedded/. 

Here’s an example of the Power BI Embedded service in action in Milliman’s Integrate application which we showcased at the BUILD 2016 conference.  As you can see, the user is simply using Milliman’s Integrate app and Power BI reports and visualizations make the information even more actionable in the context of the app!

Anonymous users on the internet

If you want to share data with the public or tell a story to your readers leveraging the interactive visualizations and reporting capabilities of Power BI, you can do this with our publish to web capability.  Anything you publish this way will be anonymously available to anyone so that they can quickly and easily find your visualizations on the Internet.  For more information, see Publish to Web.  Note that Publish to Web makes your report available to anyone on the Internet.  So consider that when evaluating this solution!

Here’s an example of how a Publish to Web report will appear in your web site or other anonymous web experience from JJ Foods:

We hope this blog helps you figure out how best to leverage the power of Power BI to empower and delight your users!

Have a blast!
Jono Luk

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