Impossible usage scenario?

[mjohansen]

I have been plowing through the documentation and been doing several tests to get closer to what we want to do but so far without any luck. Maybe PowerBI is not for us... But maybe someone here knows a good way to do this.

I am a software developer in my own company. I have a customer that I do software development for and maintain and run the customer's databases and servers (all in the cloud) which is SaaS for his customers. So we do not share ADs in any way.

Now my customer wants to gather some data in PowerBI so one of his employees can make nice reports for his customers. These reports need to be able to have data updated on a 15 minute interval when in use. I invited him to my workspace in PowerBI as guest user and made him a Contributor (also tried Viewer and Member).

I bought a PPU license. I setup an Azure SQL database that only holds data to be used. 

I setup a Dataflow in PowerBI in a new workspace. All good.

I now shared that workspace with my customer but he can only see the workspace and dataflow in the PowerBI web/service but not in Desktop.

None of us can create any report from this dataflow in web/service.

I am currently the only one that can do anything with the data but only in PowerBI Desktop.

My Azure account is open for guests.

Well I could open an IP-address for my customer and give him the connection string to the Azure SQL but I really don't want them to fiddle around with these things as they are not knowledgable on this in any way.

To put it simple:

I want to make sure data is available for my customer in a simple way for them to consume in Power BI without all the technical SQL database stuff.

My customer just wants to consume the data and make a report/graphs for his customer that is able to update regularly when accessed.

Can this even be done? Also without a multi 1000 USD Fabric license? If yes how do we proceed?

[mjohansen]

One thing:

The documentation says: "Guest users can't use Power BI desktop to connect to service semantic models or dataflows in the Power BI service"

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/enterprise/service-admin-azure-ad-b2b 

[Greg_Deckler]

@mjohansen Super common issue if you are a consultant. The short answer is that you need to provision your customer a user and PPU license in your AAD tenant and have them login with that to Power BI Desktop.

[mjohansen]

Ok. Thanks. Will try it out.