Power BI Adds Cross-Tenant Data Sharing for Partners

• Power BI is previewing an in-place data sharing feature that allows external users to build reports on data published by another customer.
• Sharing data in-place ensures external reports reference up-to-date data and allows the data provider to revoke rights at any time.
• Sharing data externally places additional burden on Power BI resources and requires opening access to the environment.

A Power BI preview adds a new external data sharing option to support business-to-business (B2B) activities in Microsoft’s cloud business intelligence (BI) offering. Unlike sharing reports externally, the external data sharing option allows a host (data provider) to selectively open access to Power BI datasets in the data provider’s tenancy. This enables external partners, vendors, and customers (data consumers) to build their own reports on up-to-data data from the provider and reduces the risk that consumers will share data inappropriately, although it does not prevent copying data. The features require adding data consumers to the data provider’s Azure Active Directory (AD) environment and configuring numerous administrative settings that open the data provider’s Power BI tenant.