As part of the Power BI Premium release, Microsoft changed how the “free users” in Power BI work within the platform. There are two key changes that affect the data security within your organization.

Power BI Free Users Cannot Share

One of the key areas of concern around the free user accounts was the fact that a corporate user can deploy content to the Power BI service (online). This would allow users to unintentionally (or intentionally) share data with others who would normally not have access to that data. When Microsoft released Power BI Premium, this capability was removed. While Power BI Free Users have access to all of the core capabilities of the product, they are not permitted to share or participate in the collaboration in workspaces. Essentially they only have access to My Workspace.

If they try to create an App Workspace, they get prompted to upgrade.

Free Users Are Read Only in Power BI Premium

When a customer chooses to use Power BI Premium, they can take advantage of “unlimited”, free, read only users. I called out the fact that Power BI did not support free users in a previous post about sharing content. Now with Power BI Apps and Premium, free users are turned into Read Only users. This is a huge win for the Power BI user community. This currently only works with Premium, so if security and managing content creation are key to success within your organization, you should be reviewing Power BI Premium.

I will have a follow up post on how Power BI Apps and App Workspaces impact data security in Power BI soon. If you want to have a look at creating and using Apps and App Workspaces check out this post on the Power BI site.