Cannot share a dashboard - You can't use invalid or duplicate emails

[sylvaing]

Hi, first time posting here and not sure if it's the right forum. We're using PowerBI through the web interface.

Our Power BI Pro licence is through our A5 licence. When we click on 'Share' for a dashboard, in the share popup, whatever we enter in the field for name or email address always gives in a red field below the entry "You can't use invalid or duplicate emails" and never pops up matching user names. When a  complete email address from the organisation is entered., the message changes to "One or more email addresses could not be validated: {email address entered appears here}".

Is there something we need to activare for sharing to work?

Thanks.

[sylvaing]

Through Support, all the options under Export and Sharing in the PowerBI Admin panel were toggled and retoggled to their original values and it fixed the problem. Looks like something was a-wire in our online PowerBI configuration.

[sylvaing · Accepted solution]

Turns out, it was a false fix. The problem is still there but I think we've found the root cause. It seems to happens when users connect directly to app.powerbi.com without first connecting to Office365. Our Office365 tenant (Azure) is forcing MFA but since the user did NOT connect to Azure first, when we try to share a dashboard, PowerBI tries to talk to Azure and that fails because MFA wasn't done. Inspecting the browser network communication, we see that Azure returns a 'AdalMultiFactorAuthRequiredErrorCode'. If we log into Azure (and MFA) first and THEN, connect to PowerBI, then sharing works.

[Greg_Deckler]

@sylvaing Ah, different A SKU. You have an Academic A5 license, the equivalent of an E5 in the corporate world, not an A Power BI Embedded capacity SKU. Joys of Microsoft licensing alphabet soup. Capacity and SKUs in Power BI embedded analytics - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

So, the next question is are you syncing your Active Directory to Office 365 or are all your users cloud-based users? You need to enter their email address but it should type ahead for you. 

If all else fails, You could check the Issues forum here:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/idb-p/Issues

And if it is not there, then you could post it.

Since you have Pro account you could try to open a support ticket. If you have a Pro account it is free. Go to https://support.powerbi.com. Scroll down and click "CREATE SUPPORT TICKET".

[sylvaing]

Yes, AD and Azure are sync'ed. We don't get this problem with other Office365 services. I'll check the Issue forum and I did open a support ticket. From past experience, support tickets can take some time (like, you answered before they did lol) to get answered so I tried my luck here. Thanks for the replies.

[Greg_Deckler]

@sylvaing Unless I am mistaken, an A5 is a capacity embedded SKU, it is not a Power BI Pro license. You would need separate Pro licenses are embedded SKU's are for embedding Power BI into a web application.

[sylvaing]

Are you sure? Under "Office 365 A5 for faculty", I have "Power BI Pro" as a service.

I didn't mean we want to embed Power BI in a web application. Sorry for the confusion, I meant we access Power BI through the web, as in https://app.powerbi.com/groups/me/dashboards/

And this is the error we get:

or this one when a full email is entered:

Thanks for the quick reply