Share different reports with different clients

[Luciano]

I have a consulting firm and I am starting to use the BI tool.

How do my customers access their reports , but do not have access to the reports of other customers?

I'll need to make entries in Office 365 for each of my clients with their respective domains?

They need to create an email account with your domain or can centralize all in one registration ?

My sincere apologies for using Google Translate ...

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@CahabaData

Before we even start talking about how to share, you should focus some time in understanding how Power BI works within Azure. Each company domain will need to create it's own Azure Tenant. You can create trusts, and things between them if the clients are willing and want to, but it's highly unlikely that you will manage all these clients under one domain.

Depending on the client data sources there are licensing costs for Pro that each will need to manage, and depending on data sources you could have issues creating reports for all your clients if you didn't have a user account in each of their tenants. If this is confusing to you, I would recommend taking a look at Adam Saxtons videos as he explains in detail how Power BI works within Azure. You can find his video's here.

Here is his latest, where he touches on some of the complications of accessing data in different domains.

This is also a really new and helpful page to outline how to manage Power BI in your tenant.

[CahabaData]

Hi Luciano

So Z's advice to use Row Level Security (RLS) is for when all the users are within the organization - such as you want sales man Jim to see his sales data while not seeing the sales data of sales man Fred.  RLS has alot of documentation put up just within the last month and so you would want to search on the topic and get to know how to implement it - if it is appropriate.

From your post however I don't think it is what you seek if you have completely different clients with completely different information.  In this case I believe you have 2 directions to go.  One direction is to administer your 365 account.  This is not so much a Power BI question as it really is all about segmenting user groups in SharePoint.  The other direction is to instruct each client to set up their own 365 account - and you be a participant in their account.  Log in for 365 is heavily based on email addresses.  If there are going to be many users of Client A - and within them you want to segment what data they view - then you would implement RLS.  Whether you do this in your 365 account or their 365 account is going to be based on how much you want to administer things and their willingness to deal potentially with alternate log in IDs.

There is a final, and much simpler solution - which is to use the Publish to Web feature of BI.  This is really great - but it is not secure.  You will find detailed instructions in the guided learning.  With this you easily create a link to your Power BI Service.  They you can copy/paste that link into an email.  Send the email to your client and they are able to work with the report you made them.  I use this and like it.  But the big caution is that there is no log in controls so anyone that gets that link can use it.  With the Power BI publish to web feature you must delete it manually to turn off that link.

I hope you find this helpful.

[CahabaData]

I forgot to add:  There is a Share option of dashboards in Power BI Service.  Unfortunately for me it has not worked.  You cannot share to a public email such as Gmail/Hotmail - - but you are suppose to be able to share a dashboard to any private email.

Some others in community report that it works for them, while others like myself report that it does not work.  In my case the feature to auto send the email never gets received at the far end - but I have not completed trouble shooting this as to whether it is an email domain management system on my side.  In any case one can also use the url manually I believe.

I must admit have not yet explored the difference between this share feature versus the publish-to-web feature. 

This might meet your needs with clients as well. 

[Eric_Zhang]

@Luciano

You can use Row-level security in your report. It can be configured to allow users see to their own data.

[Luciano]

@Eric_Zhang

How do this?  I dont find this option.