Power BI Report Server: Sharing reports with External User

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niyati_61 wrote:

But how do I present the report to an external user in another domain? How do I create Named Users for a few people from another domain so they can view the report?

 

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It depends on how "external" this other domain is. If this is something like a subsidiary that your company has aquired then I think it is possible for you IT admins to setup a trust relationship between the domains. Then it should be possible to add users from that domain to your Report Server permissions.

However if this is something like external customers that would not be an appropriate solution and this cross company sharing was not really something that Report Server was designed to address. It's actually designed for the opposite scenario when you want to keep all of the data and reports on-prem behind your corporate firewalls so that nobody else can access them.

We share a few reports with specific external users at my company, but our IT department creates users for them in our Active Directory and they have to login to our VPN using those credentials in order to access those reports.

If you need to do broad sharing to multiple customers you might want to explore publishing these to powerbi.com using a pro account. This will not cost you any extra as your report publishers are already required to have a pro license in order to publish reports to Report Server, it would just mean that your customers would also need to have a pro license in order to access those shared reports.

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niyati_61 wrote:

Or how do we share reports without any login required to view them?

 

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If you are talking about publishing reports so that anyone in the world can access them (maybe to embed a report in a public website). Then your best option would be to publish these to the powerbi.com cloud service and use the "publish to web" feature which does exactly this (note that it is possible for IT departments to lock down access to this feature so you may need to discuss this with them)