Although we believe that the latest Premium Per User license will be quite important for those who, at this time, have a Pro license or who was considering other offers available in the market, we consider that it will also be important for those who already have a Premium capacity.

At first glance this new licensing does not bring anything that add value to those who already have a Premium capacity. But appearances can be deceiving. There is one feature that will convince you otherwise.

 

Deployment Pipelines.

For those who do not know yet, deployment pipelines are Microsoft’s response to those who use Power BI as an end-to-end tool, providing lifecycle management of data visualization projects. It allows DEV and TEST environments to be created and used before deploying to end-users on a PROD environment.    This feature is only available with a Premium capability. So why do we mention that it is important in the context of the Premium Per User license for those who already have Premium capability?

 

The answer is simple for anyone who, even sporadically, exceeds the memory and CPU limits imposed by licensed capacity due to development work. The production environment should be independent of the development environment, and the fact that we are in the testing phase should not have an impact on the system’s response to end-users.  The solution to these cases so far would be to buy more Premium capacity, with all the costs associated with it.

 

Not anymore.

Taking advantage of the new Premium Per User licensing, we create new DEV and TEST workspaces and assign Premium Per User licenses to developers only.  We will thus allow development and testing environments to be created that are completely independent of the existing Premium production capacity. We also ensure that only developers have access to these environments, helping to segregate roles.  For all other users nothing changes, they continue to access the Premium production environment through the same sharing capacity they had previously.

 

Remember, the Premium Per User license is not yet in GA and there is still no information from Microsoft regarding prices. For those who want to enjoy, until it reaches that general availability stage is available for free.

 

António Lourenço

Head of Data Visualization