External Sharing

[hotpie]

I’m not sure if this is a unique situation or if others have found a solution to our problem. We are a financial services company and our customer’s data is located on premises in SQL server. We are using Data Gateway to refresh data on Power BI. We have Groups setup for each client and everything works for everybody in our organization. We would like to share the reports in these groups with the related client that is not in our organization. We cannot add external users to a group and we cannot share the enterprise gateway across different organizations.

I would like to know if anyone has a similar situation or suggestions for an elegant solution. At the moment we have to create a user account inside our organization for each client account and the related email account is not the clients real email account. If I share one of our dashboards to an external user, I get a “Something went wrong!” error if I follow the email with the link to the shared dashboard.

Thanks

[natasjamekes]

Hi @hotpie 

It's a long time ago you posted this topic but still, I want to recommend Webdahsboard. With Webdashboard you can easily share your Power BI reports and dashboards. All you need is an e-mail address.

You can try Webdashboard 30 days for free and if you need any help, they will quickly respond. It's available at the Microsoft App Source and for more information, you can visit the website: www.webdashboard.com

[DAN]

Hi Hotpie,

Does your external group/user co-work with your internal group/user ins the Power BI's group?

Thanks,

Dung Anh

[v-sihou-msft · Accepted solution]

@hotpie

As I tested, I shared a dashboard within a group to an external user. He can see the shared dashboard properly via email link.

In your scenario, you can just directly share your dashboard or content pack to external user email account.

Only your direct recipients can see the shared dashboard, any user sign up with other email account can't access this shared dashboard even they have the link. This should be the reason why you share a dashboard to a external user, but you can't access it via email link by yourself.

Another important thing is the liscensing requirement for sharing. If your dashboard contains Pro content, your recipients should also need Pro liscense to view the data. For more details, see: Share a dashboard with colleagues and others.

Regards,

[r_orange]

HI @hotpie 

does the recipients need Pro liscence or Premium per unit is valid too?

my client has PPU liscence, I have added them as guest user in azure and shared the app with them, but the thing is when i sign-in(using organizational login), when I click on the app, it just loads and loads and does nothing. it stays like this forever:

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@hotpie In addition to what Ankit offered up, there is another more advanced option for your external clients. You could leverage Power BI Embedded if you have an external facing application. This solution gets around all the "Pro" licensing requirements for external users. As it stands, they would need Power BI and "Pro" licenses to be able to see your shared dashboards.

(Side note: Your gateway is all that is needed. The data shared to external customers refreshes from your environment, they don't need to set up a gateway on their end)

[Anonymous]

If I have a dashboard(embedded) which uses ServiceNow live connection using an ODBC driver and if the data updates how will the embedded dashboard refresh? 

[Anonymous]

If I have a dashboard(embedded) which uses ServiceNow live connection using an ODBC driver and if the data updates how will the embedded dashboard refresh? 

[ankitpatira]

@hotpie When it comes to external sharing there are limited options. If sharing to individual outside organisation is not working I think your only option is to create a user account for the user inside your organisation. I have had issue before where sharing outside has not worked and I think it is due to tenant level subscription of the user and its organisation you're sharing with. If this is one off what I can suggest is you look at the option shown here where your user outside your organisation can signup for O365 trial (again not enterprise level solution). You can also consider using Publish to Web feature but with that access to your report is not managed and anyone with the link can see your report.

[Basvanbaar]

@ankitpatira @v-sihou-msft

We are experiencing the same issue as @hotpie. If we solve this by creating users on our domain for our clients and providing them with a Power BI Pro license, is this in line with the licensing terms of Microsoft? As this would basically mean sublicensing a Microsoft Power BI license?

Thanks in advance,

Bas van Baar

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Basvanbaar You don't need to create the users in your tenant. The requirement is that if you use a Pro feature, they will need to have a Pro license on their end as well.  So they would need to set up Power BI, and have Pro licenses in their tenant in order to see the dashboards that you share with them.

[Basvanbaar]

@Seth_C_Bauer

But this would mean that the external users can only view the dashboard in via a link and not in their own navigation pane, right?

We would like them to have the dashboards and reports in their own PBI environment as well, so they can use them on their windows, android or iOS applications.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Basvanbaar Correct.

To your other needs. I don't have any great answer. There may be a path here to create a Template Content Pack -- I can't say I'm very familiar as the documentation is new, and I don't recall an announcement (I'm assuming its is coming). This looks like you would need to possibly use Azure SQL DB, but I'll leave it to you to explore. This appears to allow end users access to models that you build. 

Outside of this method, there isn't really a great answer to having your users have the abilities you want without adding them into your environment, and thus having to pay those license fees...

Other than that, my other post which uses Power BI Embedded, but that would only allow them to see reports in an application.