Power BI Report Server: Sharing reports with External User

[niyati_61]

Hi @d_gosbell,

Currently I have a report saved in Power BI Report Server. Users from my company can view the report by logging in with their own system credentials as PBIRS is in my company's domains.

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?

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

P.S: I have installed Power BI Report Server (Jan 2022) Version via SQL Server Enterprise with active SA.

Kindly require your support. Thanks in advance!

[stitch_es]

Hi - Did you find a solution to your problem?  I'm currently looking into sharing reports to external users who will not have a Power BI Pro license and is not part of our organization.  We don't want to publish to web as the report as confidential information, so looking at what we else we can do with Report Server to provide the reports.

[d_gosbell]

The on-prem Report Server is not designed for external sharing.

You could invite these external users as members to your Entra ID and then assign a Pro license from your organisation.

Or you could purchase a premium capacity (either a P1 or F64) these allow free users to be viewers and are a similar monthly cost as a Report Server license.

[stitch_es]

Thank you!  I am able to invite external users and share the report with them (provided they have a pr account).  A different issue I hope you are able to help me with - I would like to use RLS to restrict those users to only see the data they have access to (table lists email and id they have access to).  For some reason the external user's UserPrincipalName() is not their email address that was used to invite them with - it has email# appended to their email.  Is that what is expected?  All external users will have email# appended to the email we use to append and that will be their UserPrincipalName()?

[Icey]

Hi @niyati_61 ,

To enable external users access, you can configure Custom Authentication or use ADFS as proxy.

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Replacing the default Windows Authentication extension with a custom authentication extension gives you more control over how external users are granted access to the report server.

Reference: configure Custom Authentication

This article discusses how to use Web Application Proxy (WAP) and Active Directory Federated Services (AD FS) to connect to Power BI Report Server, and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2016 and later. Through this integration, users who are away from the corporate network can access their Power BI Report Server and Reporting Services reports from their client browsers and be protected by AD FS preauthentication.

Reference: use ADFS as proxy

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Best Regards,

Icey

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

[d_gosbell]

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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)

[niyati_61]

Hi @d_gosbell ,

Thank you for the information above.

Currently, I'm looking into a workaround solution so that an External User (From Another Domain) can view the Report on Power BI Report Server as well.

Question, Is there a possibility that we could get the username and password of a built-in User within the Query Parameter in the Report URL? So that the Power BI Report (Currently saved in an iFrame) can open up directly without the User needing to log in at all.

Kindly require your support. Thanks in advance!

[niyati_61]

Hi @d_gosbell ,

Thank you for the information you provided above. 

I'm currently looking into a work around solution through which an External User can view a report saved on the report server. 

Question, Is there a possibility that we could get the username and password of a built-in User within the Query Parameter in the Report URL?

So, Query Parameter in the URL such that the report opens up already logged in (And you are not required to enter any login credentials).

Kindly request your support. Thanks in Advance!

[Anonymous]

I would go with what @d_gosbell suggested in creating a shared workspace as you have Power BI Pro.

But if you are going the other way, why don't you also include Row Level Security and and create a role that filers the report based on their domain or user principle name.

[d_gosbell]

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@niyati_61 wrote:

Question, Is there a possibility that we could get the username and password of a built-in User within the Query Parameter in the Report URL?

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You could maybe use this technique https://serverfault.com/questions/371907/can-you-pass-user-pass-for-http-basic-authentication-in-url...  if you switched on basic authentication. But doing that would disable the windows authentication, so everyone in your organization would have to type in their username/password every time they access the Report Server.