sharing practices

[AntoineCh]

Hi all,

I've been reading a lot of documentation but I still need some clarifications.

Current situation :

• We are a team of potentially heavy users of PowerBI
• We have free versions of powerBI but are using PowerBI desktop
• Upgrade to pro version is possible

Business needs :

• Keep data on-premise
• Find an alternative to drop-and-pick pbix and xlsx files around when we need to work in group. In particular, we have yet to find an alternative to duplicating all model changes when we are working on both excel and powerBI desktop
• Share dashboards internally and externally

Question (Dwight-style) :

• Is SQL Server + PowerBI report server the way to go ? Any major loss of feature ? Will I still be able to share dashboards online by connecting specifically to a client's IP ?
• Ideally clients shouldn't have to connect to powerBI online to view dashboards (some don't have accounts). When I use the option "Publish to web" from powerBI, I get a warning saying that my data is about to become public. But only people with access to the randomized link can see it right ? So if I imbbed my dashboard within a webpage and require a password, then I would say that only people with the site's adress and the password can access the dashboard.

Thanks for your help !

Antoine

[v-ljerr-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @AntoineCh,

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• Is SQL Server + PowerBI report server the way to go ? Any major loss of feature ? Will I still be able to share dashboards online by connecting specifically to a client's IP ?

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Yes, I think Power BI Report Server is the way to go in your scenario. You can schedule report processing, access reports on demand, and subscribe to published reports in the new web portal as you can do in SSRS. Reference: Grant user access to a report server

If you still have any questions related to Power BI Report server, I would suggest you post it in the Power BI Report Server forum for better assistance. 

• Ideally clients shouldn't have to connect to powerBI online to view dashboards (some don't have accounts). When I use the option "Publish to web" from powerBI, I get a warning saying that my data is about to become public. But only people with access to the randomized link can see it right ? So if I imbbed my dashboard within a webpage and require a password, then I would say that only people with the site's adress and the password can access the dashboard.

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I don't think it's safe enough. Though only people with the site's address and the password can access the dashboards on your webpages, those people are still be able to get the report link(embedded code) easily and share the links out(by accident or intentionally), then your reports could be viewed by anyone on the Internet.

Regards