Forum Discussion
Sharing a workspace
What we want : to share a worspace with someone not belonging to my company, who has a pro account.
We have added M. Jones as a "User" in Azure Active Directory.
He has a PBI Pro account.
On the PBI account of my company (pro account), we have created a workspace.
When I invite M. Jones into the workspace space with his email, he cannot access it.
So we created a TEST Report, which we shared with M. Jones via a link. It worked, but Power BI asked M. Jones to upgrade to a Premium licence (60-day free trial). Strange, since I've done my homework and the pro licence should suffice.
M. Jones therefore has access to the TEST report, as well as to the workspace, but on a different interface to that of his personal account (it is indeed his pro account displayed in the "my account" tab in the top right-hand corner, but his workspaces are no longer displayed). So upgrading to the Premium version wouldn't completely solve the problem, because there are still two accounts (under the same name).
He can't access the workspace from his usual personal account, but has to click on the link for the shared TEST report.
A new Authenticator account appears on his phone.
- The email address for his new Authenticator account is the same as his "User principal name" in Azure Active Directory. So M. Jones should try to connect via this User principal name instead of his personnal mail adress. But I don't know where to find the password for this User principal name.
- But even if this worked, it wouldn't completely solve the problem. M. Jones would have two accounts.
- Is it possible to change his "User principal name" to his personal email address ?
Need help please.
1 Reply
Hi TwinCircle ,
Here is the rule of thumb: if you want to share a workspace with an external user, you share it with the user's id that has a license OR you share it on a Premium Capacity and then the user does not have a license (you can literally share with [email protected] if you want if it is Premium Capacity).
You stated that you shared with the user's external userid which has the license.
Therefore, it should work. First question - do you have RLS setup and might that be affecting this user? Based on your detailed question, I don't think this is an issue, but just confirming.
Next, have you gone through this document: Distribute Power BI content to external guest users using Azure Active Directory B2B - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Then, my next question. You may have all sorts of security settings within your organization that do not all for sharing to work as expected. I point to this bit from that article: When using Azure AD B2B sharing, the Azure Active Directory administrator controls aspects of the external user's experience. These are controlled on the External collaboration settings page within the Azure Active Directory settings for your Tenant. Meaning - not in Power BI.
Now, for my real-world experience on this. To get external sharing at an organization I had to have the IT admins set up the permissions, then determine whom could send the invites and then determine if those users would be added as AD users or not. THEN, the way it worked in reality was that I would share with a user, send them the link. They would then sign in the first time with that link. After that , their userid became "visible" to me to share again externally. Basically, the link was where they signed in and then they got a "permissions" or "do you really want to go here" type pop up box and only after they accepted the invitation through that method was I then able to actually share with their external ID.
Let me know if that is of any help!
