Windows Authentication user name in Power BI Service?

ankitpatira, Thanks for your prompt reply.

To answer your question, I'm not sure yet - I'm still working on what's possible so I can discuss it with the security folks, developers, etc. But I'm afraid not. Most of the data is not sensitive, but some of it such as financial data is. So we need some sort of login to authenticate the users if this is out in the wild (public), and we'll need to implement some sort of role-based table-level security (probably custom). For example, only users with the FIN role can see the BankTransactions table. I don't think row-level security is needed, though.

I don't have any problem with Power BI Desktop or Excel, Windows authentication will work fine for them - even if they are outside our network. But the Power BI Service is in the cloud by nature, and I'm working to see what sort of authentication scheme will work for all three tools.

At this point I'm thinking about:

• Figuring out how to use Windows Auth with Power BI Service (this post)
• Securing the OData feed with OAuth2 - but I don't know yet how to implement that in Excel and Power BI Desktop, maybe with a Web API?
• Setting the users (internal and customers) up in our Office365 environment and using Organizational accounts

All of those have apparent down sides, but I'm hoping we can work out something that will work with all three tools andwe can integrate with our custom .NET application with its proprietary database-based authentication and authroization mechanism.

So this post is about the first question - Windows Auth in Power BI Service - I haven't really started on the other options yet. But any and all thoughts are welcome.

Thanks,

Sam

v-qiuyu-msft, Thanks. That username is set up at configuration time and is the same for all users running a report or dashboard that connects to a data feed that needs the gateway, correct? That is, it is not dynamic or user-based, and can't/doesn't pass or respond to the user's login credentials - it only uses the credentials set up for the gateway?

That may be okay, but we'll have to figure a way to handle different users' access. For example, we don't want the data feed to expose financial tables if the user shouldn't have access to them. So we may need to provide different data feeds for different groups of users, and find a way to limit which feeds each user can see and try to use based on their role. Ideally, they should have one login that gets them access to all the reports & dashboards allocated to them, and they can't get to a table in a data feed that they shouldn't be abe to see. (And, of course, it should work if they use Excel, Power BI Desktop or Power BI Service or Mobile to connect to the data source.)

So in this question I'm exploring the features and limitations of Power BI Service, and would like confirmation of what the Power BI Service does (or can do) in this regard.

Thanks,

Sam