Options for Providing Power BI Reports to External Users

[datawailor]

I have a question I'd like some help with where reports are being provided to external users 

We have a scenario where

1. Company uses Salesforce to assign accounts to users
2. Reports setup in Cognos use these accounts assigned to users in Salesforce to handle row level security of the Cognos reports
3. Users view their reports in Cognos using a third party application to handle authentication between Salesforce and Cognos which pass along the accounts and user info to restrict the reports in Cognos to thos accounts.
4. Cognos reports are not embedded so Salesforce is primarily being used to determine which accounts a user has access to.
   
   They would now like to transition from Cognos to Power BI. Id like to know what options do they have.

• The Power BI reports would need to leverage RLS to restrict the accounts users can have access to based on how they are setup in Salesforce
• The users are allowed to use any email domain in Salesforce so will not necessarily have an Azure AD account
• Users can currently use any email domain to log into Salesforce

Some of the questions I have are 

1. Does this require a Power BI Embed solution where a Power BI Embedded solutions is implemented which would embed the report into Salesforce? 
2. If we were not embedding the reports in salesforce cound an Azure B2C solution help with the integration between Salesforce and Power BI
3. Related to question 2, if external sharing were made available, would you advise using a different power bi tenant or use the same
4. What are any other considerations you think would be needed to be taken into account. For example Paginated Reports may be in the mix along with Power BI reports so are there other restrictions or considerations there.

Thanks

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @datawailor ,

Thanks for reaching out to us with your problem. Base on your description, it seems that you are trying to get a suitable solution to share the reprot with the external users. You can try the following methods:

1. Power BI Embedded Solution: Yes, you could use a Power BI Embedded solution to embed the reports into Salesforce. This would allow you to leverage Power BI’s interactive data visualizations within the Salesforce environment. However, this would require some development effort to integrate the two platforms.

2&3: Azure B2C Solution: Azure B2C could potentially help with the integration between Salesforce and Power BI. Azure B2C is designed to handle identity management and access control for your application, so it could be used to authenticate users and manage access to Power BI reports. However, this would also require some development effort to set up and configure.

Technical and feature overview - Azure Active Directory B2C | Microsoft Learn

Power BI Tenant for External Sharing: If you enable external sharing, you could potentially use the same Power BI tenant, but this would depend on your organization’s policies and requirements. Power BI does support sharing content with external guest users through Azure Active Directory Business-to-Business (Azure AD B2B). This allows you to share content with external guest users that they can then access in their own home tenant.

Distribute Power BI content to external guest users using Microsoft Entra B2B - Power BI | Microsoft...

4: Paginated Reports: Paginated reports are designed to be printed or shared, and they display all the data in a table, even if the table spans multiple pages. They are optimized for highly formatted, print-ready output. If you plan to use paginated reports, you would need to consider how these reports would be accessed and shared, and whether they would need to be embedded in Salesforce or another application.

What are paginated reports in Power BI? - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Paginated reports in the Power BI service - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Other Considerations: You would need to consider how to handle licensing for Power BI, as different licenses provide different capabilities and restrictions. For example, with a free license, you can publish paginated reports to My Workspace in the Power BI service, but with a Power BI Pro license or a PPU license, you can publish paginated reports to other workspaces.

Pricing & Product Comparison | Microsoft Power BI

Best Regards