We’re excited to announce a new sharing experience that allows sharing reports via links. Previously in the old experience, we supported sharing reports by granting direct access. For the new experience, reports can be shared via links in addition to direct access sharing.
Currently, this new link sharing capability is available to reports only; however, we also upgraded the share and grant access dialog for dashboards, paginated reports, and datasets to match this new look.
Check out the following sections to learn more about:
And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback on this new sharing capability, and we plan to make continued improvements.
Copy or share links to a report
You can access this new experience by navigating to Share:
You’ll see this new Send link dialog that will allow you to copy the sharing link or share it via Outlook and Teams to people in your organization:
Selecting Copy link will automatically generate and copy a shareable link to your clipboard:
You can also choose to directly send the link to Specific people or groups. Just enter their name or email address, optionally type a message, and click Send.
Once you’ve click Send, we’ll send the link via email to your recipients.
Once your recipients receive the email, they can click Open this report and automatically get access to the report through the shareable link.
Link settings
You can choose who your sharing link gives access to and what they can do with the report and associated data:
People in your organization
This type of link can allow people in your organization to access the report. This link will not work for external users (including guest users). Use this link when you want to share with someone in your organization and are comfortable with them passing the link around to other people inside your organization, but when you want to ensure that the link won’t work for external users.
People with existing access
This type of link generates a URL to the report, but it does not give any access to the report. Use this if you just want to send a link to somebody who already has access.
Specific people
This type of link allows specific people or groups to access the report. If you select this option, enter the names or email addresses of the people you wish to share with. With this link type you can share to guest users in your organization’s Azure Active Directory (AAD), but you cannot share to external users who are not guests in your organization.
Settings
Links that give access to People in your organization or Specific people will always include at least read access. However, you can also specify if you want the link to include or exclude the following permissions as well:
- Reshare permissions (included by default) – allows recipients to share the report
- Build permissions (excluded by default) – allows recipients to build content with the data associated with the report
Links for People with existing access do not have any additional settings because these links do not give any access to the report.
Additional considerations
- If your tenant admin has disabled shareable links to People in your organization, you can only copy and share links to Specific people or People with existing access.
- If you have reshare permissions to the report but, you do not have reshare permissions to the report’s underlying data, your shareable links will not give access to the underlying data.
- If you do not have reshare permissions to the report, you can only copy and share links to People with existing access.
- Additionally, if you do not have a Power BI Pro License, you only copy and share links to People with existing access. Learn more about Power BI’s license types and capabilities.
- Currently, sharing via links doesn’t support the option to Include my changes; however, you can continue using direct access sharing for this scenario.
Managing permissions
To manage permission and manage links that give access to the report, select the context menu (. . .) in the upper right of the sharing dialog, and then select Manage permissions:
This will launch the Manage permissions pane where you can copy or modify existing links or grant users direct access. To modify a given link, click the context menu (. . .).
To grant users direct access to the report click the plus icon (+), enter their name or email address, optionally type a message, and click Grant access.
For additional access management capabilities, select the Advanced option in the footer of the Manage permissions pane. This will navigate you to the management page where you can:
- View, manage, and create Links
- View and manage who has Direct access and grant people direct access
- View and manage Pending access requests and invitations
- View and manage Related content
- Apply Filters or Search for specific links or people
Note that each report cannot have more than 1,000 sharing links. In the unlikely case that your report hits this max limit, we recommend removing links that give Specific people access and instead grant those users direct access.
Tenant settings
We’ve also added two tenant setting for admins looking to disable creating shareable links to People in your organization:
- Allow shareable links to grant access to everyone in your organization
- Restrict content with protected labels from being shared via link with everyone in your organization
You can find this first setting in the Admin portal by navigating to Tenant settings > Export and sharing settings > Allow shareable links to grant access to everyone in your organization:
As with other tenant settings, you can enable sharing links to People in your organization for:
- The entire organization
- Specific security groups
- Or Except specific security groups
If this setting is disabled for a user with share permissions to a report, that user will only be able to share the report via link to Specific people or People with existing access:
You can find this second setting in the Admin portal by navigating to Tenant settings > Information protection > Restrict content with protected labels from being shared via link with everyone in your organization:
When this setting is enabled, users cannot generate sharing link for People in your organization for content with protection settings in the sensitivity label.
Note that this setting will be disabled if you have not enabled both the Allow users to apply sensitivity labels for Power BI content setting and the Allow shareable links to grant access to everyone in your organization setting.
Sensitivity labels with protection settings include encryption or content markings. For example, your organization may have a “Highly Confidential” label that includes encryption and applies a “Highly Confidential” watermark to content with this label. Therefore, when this tenant setting is enabled and a report has a sensitivity label with protection settings, then users will not be able to create sharing links for People in your organization:
Note that if a user has created a shareable link to People in your organization before the Admin has disabled the setting, this link will not be automatically deleted. However, through the Audit logs for sharing, Admins can identify which workspaces include sharing links to People in your organization, and they can add themselves as workspace admin to remove or manage those links.