Sharing reports with internal and external users

[Wilbike]

Hi everyone!

I've got some questions about sharing dashboards with colleagues and others external to my organisation and the information I'm reading online all seems to be different to what I'm actually experiencing within Power BI service. For context, I work for a programme that is shared between the two organisations - Organisation A has shared its Microsoft tenant with Organisation B. We have one workspace that we share dashboards to that has a Pro capacity. 

From what I've seen online, it appears that users will only be able to view and interact with reports published within our workspace if they have a Power BI Pro license, however after talking to Microsoft sales staff on the phone, they mentioned they have mentioned that as long as one Pro user publishes to a Pro workspace, free users should be able to view content. 

I have seen there is a publish to web option available in PowerBI. I have shared tried using the below "Website or Portal" link to share with both internal and external collegues, but when I share this with people they are still promted to sign in to their Power BI account, and, if they have a free license, they can't see the content.

So, considering this information my questions are:

1. Is it correct that users can only interact with reports published to a workspace if they have a Pro license? Is there a work around for this, eg Publish to web? Is there a reason why I can't see this option? 

2. Can external users that do have a PowerBI pro account join a workspace if we have a shared Microsoft tenant? If so, how would we do this? 

3. Does anyone have any other tips for sharing reports with users without buying additional Pro PBI Licenses. 

Thank you in advance!

[ibarrau]

Hi. Let's see.

1- When working pro content (workspaces at shared pro capacity), only pro users can build or read. Everything with pro can only be read with pro. Publish to web is a feature to create a public link. Public to the whole internet. It's considered unsecure and not recommended for private or senstive data. The picture you are showing it's not showing the option. Your report might be using some features that prevent Publish To Web. If you are still interested on this option ask again and we can deep dive.

2- You can share read view if your B2B at Azure is correctly configured. You can share reports to guest users from another tenant. There are different scenarios. Maybe this doc might help: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/guidance/whitepaper-azure-b2b-power-bi

3- You can think about Power Bi Embedded. It's a license to turn on dedicated capacity to workspaces that woul allow you to legally develop a web app to embed your PowerBi Reports in a web platform in which you own a login to share with external users. There are already built apps for this like 

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/pidata.pi-soft-pibi?tab=overview

https://piconsulting.com.ar/home/aplicaciones/pibi/

I hope that helps,