Adam Wilson over at Microsoft recently published a great blog detailing the differences between Power BI Pro and Premium licenses. It is a great article, but it left off one important detail for Dynamics 365 for Operations customers—Power BI Embedded.
What is Power BI Embedded?
The Power BI Embedded license type is intended for application developers to ship a product with embedded data visualization and is included with D365O licenses. What does that mean for D365O? It means we have Analytical workspaces.
What can you do with a Power BI Embedded License?
The Power BI Embedded license allows you to view analytical workspaces within D365O. These visuals can be customized using Power BI Desktop and incorporated back in to the application by a developer in Visual Studio and Life Cycle Services. Drill down functionality is supported, as is role based security via menu items. You can also filter data based on a users current context in the application.
Details on how to customize and author new reports can be found here:
What Can’t You Do with Power BI Embedded?
There are a few things you might want to do that will push you to the Power BI Pro or Premium license.
Data mashup scenarios are not supported. You can only query D365O via direct query. No other data sources can be uses.
As soon as you move from viewing content in D365 to PowerBI.com, you need to have a Power BI Pro or Premium license. This is likely if you have power users developing reports and dashboards on their own and using Power BI Desktop and then publishing those to PowerBI.com for distribution across your organization.
And this leads us back to Adam’s blog post, on deciding which version is right for you. It is also worth noting that Power BI Embedded is not supported for those deploying D365O on-premises.
