Share and use datasets from different tenants

[Anonymous]

Hello, 

I was wondering if it's possible to share (and use) datasets from different tenants to produce unified reports. Maybe with Power BI Premium? 

Do you have any article of reference? 

Thanks in advance! 

[rappleton]

Hi all, 

Did anyone find a solution to the single sign on between two tenants?

I have seen this (below) but not sure it answers all of our questions, i.e. does this require premium capacities in both tenants for users to be able to view reports, can we still use the same Azure AD groups for governance, do we still get the usage stats for both tenants, etc. 

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-ie/blog/introducing-cross-tenant-power-bi-dataset-sharing/

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous Not to my knowledge. You can share between workspaces but not tenants. See Usage Models:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/Power-BI-Usage-Models-in-Pictures/ba-p/1342820

[Anonymous]

@Greg_Deckler I found this page where there is an explanation of Power BI Embedded for a multi-tenant situation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/embed-multi-tenancy 

However, I still have no clue on how to practically implement it or to test it... 😐 

It's the first time I hear of it, but I'm not a developer. 

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous Are we talking different tenants? Tenant in Power BI is the same as an Office 365 tenant basically. It is a logical construct for security. Things don't pass between tenants. You can't even migrate the email from one Office 365 tenant to another without extracting all of the data and then importing all of the data.

What you have there is for building multi-tenant (read customers) reporting. So think an ISV building a cloud app has multiple "tenants" or customers. However, it's all in a single Azure "tenant", the one the ISV owns.

Right?

[Anonymous]

@Greg_Deckler I see... I thought that through APIs you could somehow bypass the tenant boundaries. 

The scenario I have is a customer (we are not their CSP/ISV) with two tenants. They want to unify their datasets and be able to share the same reports based on both datasets. 

What I was thinking then is to automate exporting the data from Tenant 1 with a scheduled job, saving the file locally, and feed Tenant 2's Power BI with that file as a source, merge the data in one table, build a report in Tenant 2, and share the report with Tenant 1.  

This would give data redundancy, but I guess it would get the job done... Suggestions? 

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous 

[Anonymous]

LOL... 😄

[V-lianl-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

In desktop, you can connect to the same dataflow with different tenant accounts.

Dataflows are NOT linked to the currently signed in user. The connection is authenticated, not the current user. The “Sign In” button must be selected, and authentication completed to connect to a Power BI dataflow.

The connection information for the dataflow is cached with Power BI Desktop, and subsequent connections to dataflows will not require the user to sign in.

The connection information for the dataflow is cached with Power BI Desktop, and subsequent connections to dataflows will not require the user to sign in. The same authentication credentials will be used.

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

[chaz2jerry]

Hi Liang, can you elaborate more on this approach?  It seems confusing to me.  

So in order for a PBI dataset/report in Tenant2 to use dataflow in Tenant1, will I need to:

- sign in Desktop as Tenant1 user, connect to dataflow in Tenant1

- then save and send the file to a user in Tenant2, or re-sign-in Desktop as Tenant2 user

- publish Desktop to Tenant2

Is this the correct workflow? Will the cloud refresh in Tenant2 work? Do we need to provide Tenant1 user credential (for the dataflow source) in the cloud refresh settings in Tenant2 dataset?

[mmace1]

@chaz2jerry  just curious what conclusions you came to? 

Due to a takeover, we have 2 seperate tenants (Parent organization, and us).  

That requires people to login to different tenants to get reports.  The most minor goal is to allow one signin to access the reports of both tenants.  Which doesn't seem like a thing to me...but am googling away...

[Anonymous]

Did your googling (or anything else) get you an answer on this topic? I'm going down the same google rabbit hole right now.