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Microsoft Idea

Power BI

Under Review

Multi-tenancy scenarios

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Andy Ball on 31 Jan 2015 16:56:24

We would love to use Dashboard to publish reports for our customers but would want to separate out by customer - ie have separate sub areas / folders per customer , where we can permission per customer - ie only users in relevant Customer group has permission to the folder



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on 20 Apr 2021 20:09:01

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

I'm looking at a very similar situation with SQL. I have multiple customer sites that all have the exact same sql structure. I have a set of reports that I want to maintain in one location but each customer see their own data when they access the reports. Right now, I am pulling all data in dynamically and using RLS to control. The problem is that the PBI Service cannot refresh these data sets due to the dynamic sources so I have to open PBI Desktop, refresh the data and republish. Maintenance nightmare!

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Whit Waldo on 05 Jul 2020 23:46:29

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

The documentation for multi-tenancy at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embed-multi-tenancy is quite clear in that for data isolation, scalability and cost it's better to be able to utilize a workspace-based architecture as opposed to row-level security-based. That said, the largest downside is the proliferation and management of the various artifacts created within each of the workspaces.

The documentation appears to indicate that the intention would be that each workspace would be responsible for creating and maintaining their own separate reports, but fails to address the scenario in which I'd like to have a common set of reports that is centrally created, updated and managed without workspaces having any such autonomy themselves.

Rather, it would be ideal for my purposes to have greater control from the master account to programmatically clone and manage these artifacts from a global perspective. In my scenario, I would intend, as the SaaS provider, to exclusively create a common collection of reports that are propagated to all of the workspaces whenever I author a new report or update an existing one. Given that each of my customers' data resides on a separate database, each workspace would then ideally be programmatically configured to utilize separate connection strings, but since they would all have identical schemas, the reports could be easily and centrally managed for all workspaces on the account.

I would be more than happy to speak with someone over a call about my scenario here.

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Matt Whitesell on 05 Jul 2020 23:36:04

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

huge for merger customers

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Jean Luc Gauthier on 05 Jul 2020 23:22:37

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

Hello, is this still under review or it's available within Power BI? Didn't see anything regarding multi-tenant in the application settings.

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Alwyn Pereira on 05 Jul 2020 23:10:04

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

Has this been solved? This is huge for us as well. We actually have separate tenant databases per customer, and would like to have a single report that can actually point to different customer dbs depending on the logged on users organization

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Adam Reed on 05 Jul 2020 22:39:19

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

Critical feature to be able to provide report access across Azure/Azure AD tenancy. Especially for companies supporting multiple entities that may have different tenants but same reporting or silo'd departments.

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 22:29:26

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

Yes please include this as a key feature for PowerBI as it will definitely benefit our customers and Microsoft greatly! Win-Win product request.

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 22:29:18

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

This is the only missing item that is stopping our organization from selecting Power BI over competitors such as Tableau. Microsoft is losing a lot of money from potential SaaS partners.

Using our case as an example, each clients would have their own site inside Power BI. Each client can manage users and reports within their own site.

We, as the SaaS software provider, have a master account with access to every client's site. We can add/update standard reports and push them out to all of the client sites without overwriting each customer's custom reports. We also can manage the provisioning of sites for new customers. We can limit things such as # users for each site.

We use a single data source so security and proper data filtering needs to be in place to prevent each client from seeing other client's data.

Example of how this works in Tableau:
https://tableauandbehold.com/2016/03/18/the-tenets-of-tableau-templates-on-multitenants/

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Sreedhar Reddy on 05 Jul 2020 22:26:52

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

We are in the same boat as SaaS and need multi tenant support for Power BI Embedded. Please advise.

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Dan Haligas on 05 Jul 2020 22:26:22

RE: Multi-tenancy scenarios

Yes please. This is huge.