Data Input from External Organizations

[ahokky]

My organization is serving a client who is a contributor to a collaborative project with 7 other organizations. At least one representative from each institution will need to be able to input new data manually, and my organization's task is to set up the dashboard that will automatically populate figures and reports of the data from all institutions as well as each individual institution. I have dug a bit into the forum and resource articles, but am still feeling unsure about whether Power BI can handle this level of external collaboration. My main questions are, does Power BI offer this level of external collaboration and what might the limitations of the software be for this purpose?

Thanks in advance! I welcome any helpful ideas, tips, and insights.

[Tutu_in_YYC]

Power BI is a visualization service, not a data collection service. That said, as long as you can find a location to consolidate your data, google drive or even externally shared/collaborated excel file that is hosted in the tenant the same as your Power BI tenant, and your clients have access to it, you can connect using Power BI to that Excel file.

Once that is done, you can definitely share your reports to external users using power bi.

Summary: Consolidate data somewhere else, then use power bi to connect to it.

[Tutu_in_YYC]

Another option this. Each client have their own eg excel file in their tenant. And you just need credential to access that excel file. This will allow you to connect to different excel files from different clients in Power BI.

This requires the client organization to enable collaboration with external users, i.e giving file access to you.

[Alexandra_B]

Hello @ahokky ,

I was wondering if you managed to solve this? I need to do the same and was looking for tips 🙂

For the moment I am just thinking of creating a form using OneDrive (Microsoft forms) , the results are saved automatically and can link the spreadshet to Power BI. I am looking for more options though.
Thank you.

[ahokky]

Hi Alexandra,

We inevitably went with using forms in Power Apps to collect data and submit them to a SharePoint list. This SharePoint list is then used as the data source for the Power BI dashboard. You may also be able to use Microsoft Forms for this, as well.

[Alexandra_B]

Great, will try anything.
Thank you for your reply.

All the best!  🙂

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

Hi @ahokky 

Power BI is very good and getting data from multiple sources and consolidating it into a single dataset which you can then create powerful reports on.

For data input Power BI is not the tool for the job in my opnion. Something like Power Apps could do this for you. And you can then use Power BI to consume the data from Power APps.