Enforce License Requirements for Workspace Roles and Changing Reports

Even though Microsoft says in their documentation (Roles in workspaces in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn) states for roles "All these capabilities, except viewing and interacting, require a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license.". This statement is not correct.

Our Power BI environment is mostly business self-service managed. We have Power BI Premium capacities and our Power BI PRO license holders have been granted the ability to create workspaces and manage the assignment of workspace roles. The PRO license holders were made aware of various best practices including role assignments.

We have identified a situation in which a person was granted an elevated role (Admin, Member or Contributor) in a workspace without also having been granted a PRO license. Microsoft allows this to occur. If the person tries to navigate to the workspace, they will get an error message (which is good). However if a report was shared with the person. the person can open the report, EDIT it and SAVE it in its changed form. The report creator and workspace admins won't know that the report has been changed.

I raised the issue with Microsoft and they state that this functionality is as designed. Non-PRO license holders are allowed to make changes to reports in premium workspaces if they have inadvertently been given elevated workspace role privileges.

This is a gap that should be corrected so that it can't occur or the documentation changed to reflect that this anomaly is allowed to occur.