Having the capability to connect external people (B2B) into your data within Power BI is a great feature and a huge advantage when comparing to other customers in my opinion.

In this blog post I want to demonstrate how to easily allow external users to always find the data that they have access to in other organizations.

I have been doing a fair bit of work with the external (B2B) sharing capabilities within Power BI.

The main area’s that I currently see for external sharing are:

  • Sharing via the New App Experience
  • Allowing External Users access to App Workspaces

The challenge that I have found is that very often the external users get the initial link via email, which is great at the start. But then at a later point in time they struggle to find the email with the link.

Or an external user already has got their own Power BI running for their own data. They then try and find data that has been shared with them externally and they struggle to find the data they are looking for.

NOTE

It is assumed that I have already shared either an App or granted external access to a user on one of my App Workspaces.

Find your Tenant URL for External Customers to use

The first thing to do is to find your tenant URL. This is YOUR Power BI URL

  • I log into my Power BI Tenant
  • I then click on Help & Support, and then About Power BI
  • This then brings up the Power BI Window as shown below.
    • From the image above I can now see my Tenant URL
  • Now a little-known secret (which has been seen in the Power BI Blog Post) is that I can click on the Tenant URL, which will allow me to highlight it as shown below.
    • Now I can copy the Tenant URL
    • NOTE: Save this into an email or Notepad.
  • I now have got my tenant URL

Sharing & Bookmarking the Tenant URL for External Users

Now that I have my tenant URL the next step is to share this URL with the external users and ask them to bookmark the URL.

This will allow them to know where to go when searching for reports that have been shared with them.

TIP: What I do is because I have had Apps and App Workspaces shared from multiple different customers, I have created a separate Person in Google Chrome (or you could possibly do it in your own personal browser of choice)

Let’s assume in the steps below that I am external user and I have received the Tenant URL via email.

  • I can either click on the link in the email or copy and paste it into my browser
  • I will be prompted to log in
    • NOTE: This will be my work account that I use to log into my normal Power BI tenant
  • I then see the following below.
  • The awesome thing is that I now can see all the content that has been shared with me.
  • And if I had an App Workspace access, I too would be able to view it by clicking on the arrow next to Workspaces
  • I then will create a bookmark in my browser for my external Power BI reports.

This has come a long way from when it started, and you had to save the link as a bookmark for each App that was shared with me.

There is good news in that in the Business Applications Release Notes there is an update to Power BI Home, which as shown below shows using Organizational Branding.

This will go a long way to know which Power BI tenant you are in, be that your company tenant or an external tenant!

Conclusion

In this blog post I have covered how to allow for external users be able to view Apps or App Workspaces. As well as what it will look like in the future.

I hope that you found this useful and as always comments and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks for reading!