Azure Analysis Services & External users

[RAY_DEV]

Hi all,

We're currently building our BI module connected to our ERP solution, that we want to deploy towards our customers, and we face a challenge. 

Here is how we proceed today to build the reports and deploy it: 

1. Building the Model on Visual Studio (Tables relations, new columns) and deploying the Model on Azure Analysis Services
2. We create a workspace for each customer at app.powerbi.com
3. With Power BI Desktop, we connect to the Model on AAS and we build the reports (new measures, vizualisations) and we deploy it on the workspace created for the customer

Now the challenge is to open accesses to these reports (viewer, contributor or member) to external users (different mail servers than ours). 

Our testing showed that it works if we add the user under "Analysis Services Admins", and we share the reports on the workspace, the external user can access it, but we've seen that the user has also access to all other Models on AAS, for other customers as well. 

If we don't add the users on Admins, but only share the report or workspace, they get an error message saying that they don't have access to the AAS model. 

The questions are:

• Is our deployment approach as described the best way (we want to use AAS instead of Power BI Premium for cost-flexibility)?
• How to open accesses to external users?

Thank you very much for your help. 

[v-alq-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi, @RAY_DEV 

I'd like to suggest you refer the following links. Hope it helps.

Azure Analysis Services, Azure AD, and RLS 

Restrict data access with row-level security (RLS) for Power BI Desktop 

Best Regards

Allan

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

[Greg_Deckler]

This sounds like you should be using Row Level Security versus what you are currently doing.