Forum Discussion
Subscribe Button does not appear to external users
Hi,
We are having a problem with the Subscription functionality. We have a report that is accessed by external users, although they are registered in our AD, supposedly with all permissions enabled.
They need to subscribe by email to the updates of these reports, but the button does not appear anywhere. In the PowerBI administration we have everything enabled:
Do you know what it could be? How can we enable this functionality to external users?
We have read somewhere that a premium workspace or the PPU might be necessary, but we have tried that too and it didn't work.
The possibility of the subscription being managed by us as administrators is not valid, because the report has RLS and it is necessary to apply these security restrictions per user.
Thanks,
David
3 Replies
Hi davidvl
I have reviewed the relevant documentation and have summarised a few points
1 What is certain is that guest users can not to create subscriptions by themselves. As mentioned in the following article, item 14 of article 3.
b2b considerations and limitations
2 Noteworthy,for paginated and Power BI report email subscriptions, if the dataset uses row-level security (RLS), you can create subscriptions for yourself and others. Those subscriptions will run using your security context.
service report subscribe considerations for subscribing others
Only people within the organisation can create subscriptions, people outside the organisation who want to subscribe by email to the updates of these reports can only do so through someone within the organisation.
Best Regards
Community Support Team _ chenwu zhu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.
Thanks for your response.
I found it really strange that there wasn't a way to do this even though they are External (or some way to consider them Internal).
We'll see if we can find a workaround.
Best regards,
David
Confirming what you found — this is a documented B2B limitation: guest users can't create their own subscriptions, and the "have an internal user subscribe on their behalf" route also hits a wall (Power BI blocks subscribing a recipient outside your domain). PPU/Premium doesn't change it, because it's about the recipient's identity, not the capacity.
Since you're already on RLS, the workaround that holds up is to serve the reports through an embedded portal on your capacity and schedule the email delivery from there — the export is generated against the RLS role you specify, so each external recipient gets only their own data, with no Power BI license on their side.
Disclosure: I build one of these (Embedsy), so take it with that grain of salt — but the underlying pattern (Embedded + scheduled exports honoring RLS) is what solves this generally. Details here: https://embedsy.io/blogs/schedule-email-power-bi-reports-external-users
