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Trusted Third Party Connectors for Power BI

Headshot of article author Colin Popell

We’re happy to announce one of our most commonly requested features for custom connector support in Power BI – Trusted Third Party Connectors.

As it stands today, the only way that you can use a connector with the ‘Recommended’ security setting is for it to be signed and distributed by Microsoft.

Unfortunately, this stops a lot of legitimate connectors from being used safely–any time you want to use a connector that you’ve built and trust securely, if you don’t go through us, you’re unable to use it.

To solve this, we’re now providing a mechanism for signing and trusting connectors.

For Developers

Developers need to download the package containing the ‘MakePQX’ tool. Follow the instructions in the Power Query documentation on handling connector signing and distribute the connector to your user, along with the thumbprint of the signature.

For End-Users and Admins

To get started trusting a third party connector, you can read how to trust a signed connector here. Essentially, you can use group policy to enable all users (or whichever ones the policy applies to)  to take the thumbprint given you by the developer and load it in the ‘Recommended’ security zone of Power BI.