Options for sharing dashboards with sensitive information with PowerBI

0
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I have a dashboard I've built using Power BI, that contains sensitive information. I want to share this dashboard with external users outside of my organization, that do not and will not have PowerBI.

From everything I've read, it appears I have a few options:

  1. The external recipient of the dashboard would need to download Power BI Pro (from my understanding, they won't be able to view my dashboard with anything other than Power BI Pro?)

  2. I somehow embed my dashboard in a sharepoint which the external recipients have access to - but from what I've read, this seems likely to fail since they don't have Power BI.

  3. I publish dashboard to the web, and have no way to password protect or restrict access.

Are these my only options? Am I correct in that anyone I wish to share the dashboard with needs Power BI Pro to view, or I need to publish it to the open web and let it be publicly available?

If this is the case.. this is just one more reason I am disenchanted by Power BI.

Thanks!

2
powerbi
You can do this with a Power BI Premium license. - Alexis Olson
Power BI premium is really effective when you are sharing with a lot of users. That being said, both pro and premium are going to cost you and there is no getting around that. - CR7SMS
I can't be a 100% certain, but it looks like they are the only available options. The only other option would be to share the Power BI file directly and ask the users to refresh it (which is not ideal) - CR7SMS
Yeah, I don't think you can do this for free. I have done it with premium though. - Alexis Olson
The power Bi desktop software is needed, but it's free. And you are right, if the user does not have access to the data, they won't be able to refresh - CR7SMS

2 Answers

1
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There are other options in addition to these you mentioned already (i.e. directly sharing through adding users to the workspace, embed in SharePoint and Publish to web).

Sharing (except Publish to web, which is public) require both the publisher and the consumer to have Power BI Pro licenses (which is not the case for you). Purchasing Power BI Premium (P SKUs only) will allow you to share reports with non-Pro (i.e. Power BI free users), but they still needs Power BI licenses (although free). Also this will costs you thousands per month and has annual commitment, which means you can't buy this for a month or two.

If this doesn't work for you, you can also:

  • Export these reports to PDF or PowerPoint and share the files with them.
  • If the report imports the data (see Dataset modes in the Power BI service), you can send them the .pbix file directly. It can be opened in Power BI Desktop even without having no Power BI account at all.
  • Publish the report to local instance of Power BI Report Server, where you can control who can access the report. You need either Power BI Premium (P SKUs) or SQL Server Enterprise with software assurance for that.
  • Embed the report using Power BI's API into custom written application, implementing app owns data scenario (see Tutorial: Embed Power BI content into an application for your customers and for example this answer).
1
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To add to Andrey's answer, depending on the number of users you can use Azure AD B2B so you can have guest users access your Power Bi Reports and allocated work-spaces. However it depends on the number.

For example if you need to add 100 users, and you pay for the Power BI Pro licenses then it would be cheaper to design a basic portal and use the Power BI Embedded option and build you own basic web portal to embedded the reports in (The app owns data scenario). The basic A SKU's start around the same price as about 73 Pro licenses, or £570 per month. There will be extra cost in development of the portal and the running costs on top of the Embedded price

If your external end user is going to pay for the Pro license, then Azure AD B2B could work for you.

Hope that helps