Publishing from PBI Desktop as Guest

[venisonsteak]

I work as a consultant and was invited to my customer's tenant so that I could publish Power BI reports.  My customer created a workspace and shared it with me.  I am able to sign into their organization by using the sign-in options>sign in to an organization>domain name>and then sign in using my credentials.  When I do this, everything seems to work perfectly until I try to publish it to the shared workspace.  Once I do that, I get the following message "Only users with certain Power BI licenses can publish to this workspace."  I have a Pro license and I'm actually able to publish to "My workspace" on their tenant.

Any idea why this is happening?  Is there some sort of setting in the workspace that's preventing me, an external user, from publishing?

Any help in the right direction is appreciated.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi  @venisonsteak ,

As far as I know, there are some limitations for guest users' experiences in Power BI. Publishing from Power BI Desktop to Power BI Service are not supported.

For reference:

• Some experiences aren't available to guest users even when they have higher-level permissions. To update or publish reports, guest users need to use the Power BI service, including Get Data, to upload Power BI Desktop files. The following experiences aren't supported:

  • Direct publishing from Power BI desktop to the Power BI service
  • Guest users can't use Power BI desktop to connect to service semantic models or dataflows in the Power BI service
  • Sending ad hoc invites isn't supported for workspace access lists
  • Guest users can't install a Power BI Gateway and connect it to your organization
  • Guest users can't install apps published to the entire organization
  • Guest users can't use Analyze in Excel
  • Guest users can't be @mentioned in commenting
  • Guest users who use this capability should have a work or school account

Here is the offical blog about this limitation: Distribute content to external guest users with Microsoft Entra B2B

Best Regards,
Rico Zhou

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Shravan133]

he issue you're experiencing likely stems from the way external user permissions are managed within Power BI workspaces. Here are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot and potentially resolve the issue:

1. Workspace Settings: Ensure that the workspace settings allow external users to publish content. The admin of the workspace should check the workspace settings under the "Access" tab and ensure that you have the appropriate role (e.g., Contributor or Member) that allows publishing.

2. Licensing: Verify that your Pro license is properly recognized in the customer's tenant. Sometimes, there can be discrepancies when working across different tenants. Confirm with the customer that their tenant settings recognize your Pro license correctly.

3. Guest User Permissions: Check the Azure Active Directory (AAD) settings for guest users. The customer's IT department may need to adjust settings in AAD to allow external users to have the necessary permissions to publish content to shared workspaces.

4. Conditional Access Policies: Ensure that there are no conditional access policies in place that might restrict your ability to publish reports. The customer's IT department can review their conditional access policies to ensure external users are not inadvertently restricted.

5. Power BI Admin Portal Settings: The Power BI admin portal has settings that control sharing and collaboration features. The Power BI admin at the customer's organization should check the "Tenant settings" to ensure that external sharing is enabled and that there are no restrictions preventing you from publishing to the shared workspace.

6. Workspace Type: Confirm that the workspace you are trying to publish to is not a Premium Per User (PPU) workspace if your Pro license does not cover PPU features. The workspace may require a different licensing model.