As announced last year by Microsoft, Office 365 now allows any user in your organization to purchase a license for Power BI Pro. As Message Center post MC193609 announced, Power BI Pro is available for self-service purchase beginning on January 14th, 2020. The current price for a Power BI Pro license with annual agreement is $9.99 USD.
The other Power Platform tools, Power Automate and Power Apps, will be available for self-service purchase by your users on January 28th, 2020.
Watch the video below for step-by-step instructions!
Why not allow self-service?
There are a few reasons why you might want to disable the ability for your users to purchase licenses themselves. A few that come to mind are feature governance, service governance, and billing rules. Your organization, however, may want to allow users to purchase licenses themselves. You should discuss this functionality with your decision makers and make an informed decision now.
There can also be an impact on Office 365 adoption with a self-service mentality. This side of self-service was covered in Episode 7 of The Coffee Chat on 365 Adoption video series.
How to disable (or enable) self-service purchases
To disable or re-enable self-service purchasing for the Power Platform, a Global or Billing Administrator in your organization needs to use the PowerShell module ‘MSCommerce' and the AllowSelfServicePurchase parameter.
To see what the setting is currently for your organization for Power BI Pro, use this PowerShell command:
[sourcecode language=”plain”]Get-MSCommerceProductPolicy -PolicyId AllowSelfServicePurchase -ProductId CFQ7TTC0L3PB[/sourcecode]
You missed the deadline – now what?
If you have made the decision to disable self-service, the first step is to disable self-service and then evaluate who purchased licenses using self-service.
No matter what your decision is on self-service, you need to work with your users to understand their needs and provide timely solutions to their requests.
