As a Power BI developer you are sometimes working for different organizations and have to access multiple tenants. To do this, you either have a dedicated account in each tenant or you are added as a guest to an organization. Accessing Power BI in an external tenant via browser at app.powerbi.com or via Power BI Desktop is possible but requires some extra steps. Read on to learn how to.
Power BI Desktop
If you want to publish a report from Power BI Desktop or use a published semantic model, you need to be logged in to the corresponding tenant. Follow the steps below to achieve it:
1. In Power BI Desktop, click on “Sign in” and provide the Email address which you want to use for sign in.
2. Click on “Continue” and in the following screen select “Sign-in options”
3. Don’t pick an account and select “Use another account”
4. Select “Sign in to an organization”
5. Provide the domain of the tenant you are trying to sign in. For example, if you wanted to sign in to the syntera tenant, you would provide “syntera.ch” as the domain name. In the example below, I’m logging in to my Microsoft Developer Tenant which has the domain name “8w7r5y.onmicrosoft.com”:
6. After selecting your organisation, complete the login process with your account as you would normally do.
7. You are now connected to the specified organisation. You should be able to use semantic models and publish to workspaces which you have access to.
Power BI Service
To login to a Tenant on which you are added as a guest you need the corresponding tenant URL. This URL is a combination of the normal Power BI Service URL and the unique identifier of the tenant. The whole Power BI Tenant URL can be retrieved by navigating to the Power BI Service > Help and Support > About Power BI > Tenant URL.
As you are not logged in to the tenant currently, you won’t be able to do this on your own. Ask an administrator from the tenant to retrieve it for you.
Alternatively, if you know the domain of your target environment, you can search for the tenant id yourself by using Tenant Lookup Tools. Retrieve the displayed tenant identifiere and replace {yourTenantID} in the URL below with the retrieved id:
Now put this URL in your browser and log in as you usually do. You should now be able to access the tenant as a guest user. Verify that it is working by checking the workspaces and the tenant id in the browser.
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6 responses to “Login to Power BI with Guest Account”
Hi, does this work if my organization has “Pro” license and the guest user from different organization also has it’s own “Pro” license.
It would be great if you have answer for this. I tried this but when the guest user tries to publish a report to our workspace, he gets an error saying this type of user cannot publish reports.
Please help.
Hi
Yes, at least pro license on both sides is required. Has the user permission to create new artefacts in the workspace? At least contributor is required.
There have been some restrictions on publishing directly from Power BI Desktop, have you tried uploading directly to the workspace?
Hi,
Yes, the guest user has been assigned as contributor to the workspace. But when publishing directly from Power BI Desktop, gets an error “Only users with certain Power BI licenses can publish to this workspace”.
We haven’t tried publishing directly to workspace, let me try it.
Thank you.
Also ensure that the workspace itself is in the license mode “pro” and not PPU or similar.
Hi,
It worked! Thanks a lot.
Nice, glad to hear!