Distributing Reports to External Users who aren't in AAD or have Power BI

[Neka]

We want to distribute reports to external users such as vendors and customers, and we want to find the most secure and sustainable ways to do so.

We have two different reports that need to be distributed right now:

Report 1: A Vendor Grading report that used to be an SSRS report and then later Excel files emailed manually to vendors, now considering using a PBI paginated report

Report 2: A weather tracking report that’s in PBI Desktop which needs to be sent to customers

What we would like to do for each report:

Report 1:

• Dynamic Email and Report Filtering:
  • Desire is to send scheduled emails to external contacts with data filtered by vendor so that they only see their own data:
    1.       Our data sources contain contact email(s) per vendor
    2.       Our data sources contain information that can be filtered by vendor

•       Contacts are external and cannot be added to active directory since vendors can be added or removed and contacts within vendors can change

Report 2:

• Static email without report filtering:
  • Desire is to send a static picture of report, does not require filtering by customer:
    1.       Data sources contain data for report
    2.       A list of external email addresses should receive a copy of the report on a schedule

Keep in mind that the people receiving the reports don’t have Power BI.

We have researched extensively but find it difficult to determine the best course of action for sending these reports to external users as well as the steps to do so. Any information on best practices would be appreciated.

What is the best way to send to external users?

1. Through PBI Desktop for Report 2 (is this possible?)
2. PBI Paginated Reports
3. Subscriptions
4. Power Automate
5. Create Guest Users in Azure (we don’t want to use this unless it is absolutely necessary)

Additional note, not all parties have Power BI premium capacity.

[lbendlin]

You have multiple requirements that conflict with each other.  You may want to explore the use of a Microsoft partner to talk through all of the possible (and impossible) scenarios. This is highly complex, with lots of moving parts.