sharing dashboards externally?

[vanessafvg]

What is the best way to share dashboards with people outside of your organisation (or should i say outside of your office 365 tenant) but the dashboards should be secure from public view?

Also what capabilities would those external users have, and do they need power bi pro licenses if they looking at pro content?  How does that all work with external people?

[djnww]

You can currently share a dashboard outside your organisation. However, they won't be able to add it to their own organisational workspace and repin them etc. I believe Microsoft is working on this and it should be possible by the end of the year.

However, here are some workarounds:
1. Share the dashboard with an external email address (as discussed above)
2. Send the organisation your PowerBI Desktop file so that they can publish it themself.
3. Send multiple organisations a PowerBI template so they can publish it themselves. The template will connect to your on premise data source and populate their desktop file. They can then publish it themselves.
4. The easiest is for them to create a special account for you within their organisatiom. Then you can publish it for them.

Cheers,
Dan

[vanessafvg]

Hi thanks for the response, im curious how it would connect to your network on prem on no 3, they would need access to your network?

A special account?  How is that set up?

Option 1 sounds the easiest, they only need to view it but unless its in your personal workspace, you would need  pro license right? i.e if its in a group space.   

[djnww · Accepted solution]

Hi @vanessafvg,

I just realised that you're the author of both posts that I'm responding to.

Unfortunately, most of these enablers will likely require help from IT.

You could:

1. Store your files on Sharepoint and grant access to the file to a user in an external organisation. This is provided your company has actually enabled Sharepoint for external usage. In some cases, the licensing your company has purchased does not include external access.

2. Share files via SFTP. Perhaps you can upload the files to their environment then they can refresh Power BI themselves.

3. We have Azure Cloud. So our Power BI Desktop files are created to automatically grab data from our SQL database. We send Power BI Desktop templates to all our suppliers who then just click on Refresh to grab the latest data.

It's a shame personal gateway now requires a PRO license. I'm pretty such that was never the case.

Keep in mind that even with Tableau, you face the same problem. Tableau users have to send the whole files to anyone external for viewing. At least Power BI offers you the capability to semi-automate it provided your environment is set up correctly.

Apologies if I have not made sense. My son has been bugging me the whole time.

Cheers,

Dan

[farshidHosseini]

What if we buy an office 365 account for our client (within our organization's domain) and add this user to Power BI service and share Power BI content. So, the external client would need use provided office 365 ID + pass to view Power BI dashboards.

Can this be a solution? 

Thanks,

Farshid

[djnww]

Hi fardid. Yes. This is definitely a solution 🙂
However, with the recent licensing changed, everyone has to be PRO or on the Premium service.

[vanessafvg]

no worries lol @djnww thanks for the advice