Glossary
What is Microsoft Entra ID?
Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, is Microsoft's identity and access service. It manages users, groups, guest users and app registrations for services including Microsoft 365 and Power BI.
Microsoft Entra ID explained
Microsoft renamed Azure Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID in 2023; the way it works stayed the same. Every organisation using Microsoft 365 has an Entra tenant containing its employees, groups and applications. That is also where you set policies, such as mandatory two-factor authentication or conditional access based on location or device.
For Power BI, Entra ID is the source of every identity. If you want to share a report with someone outside your organisation, you invite them as a guest user in your tenant. That works, but with many external users, managing guests, licences and permissions soon becomes a chore.
Applications that sign in without a person, such as a portal that embeds reports, use an app registration with a service principal. It also lives in Entra ID and is given only the permissions the application needs.
Example
Acme Groothandel's employees sign in to Microsoft 365 and Power BI with their Entra account. For the reporting portal's app registration, Acme's IT administrator creates a separate security group, so that only that application may use the Power BI APIs.
Microsoft Entra ID in ENABLE
ENABLE uses Microsoft Entra ID for the connection to Power BI: a service principal per customer requests the embed tokens. End users sign in with their own ENABLE account and two-factor authentication; signing in with Microsoft Entra ID for end users is planned but not yet available.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is Microsoft Entra ID the same as Azure Active Directory?
Yes. Microsoft renamed Azure Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID in 2023. The service, its features and the admin centre stayed the same.
What is a guest user in Microsoft Entra ID?
A guest user is someone from outside your organisation whom you invite into your Entra tenant, for example to view a Power BI report. The guest signs in with their own account and you decide their permissions.
Do you need Microsoft Entra ID for Power BI Embedded?
Yes, the application signs in to Power BI through an app registration in Entra ID, usually as a service principal. When embedding for customers, the portal's end users do not need an Entra account themselves.
Further reading
- ResourcesShare Power BI dashboards securely: your optionsYou can share a Power BI dashboard in four ways: Publish to web, sharing in the Power BI service (directly or through an app), inviting external users as B2B guest users, or showing the reports in a portal with Power BI Embedded. For colleagues, the Power BI service is usually enough. To share Power BI dashboards securely with customers, suppliers and other external users, guest users or a customer portal are the right choice; Publish to web is public and never suitable for business data.Read more
- PlatformPower BI row-level security and dashboard accessAccess profiles, Power BI row-level security, two-factor authentication and an audit log.Read more
- ResourcesWhat is Power BI Embedded? Scenarios and optionsPower BI Embedded is the way to show Power BI reports and dashboards in your own application, website or portal, instead of in Microsoft's Power BI service. There are two variants: embedding for your organisation, where users sign in with their own Microsoft account, and embedding for your customers, where the application handles access through a service principal and end users do not need a Power BI licence. For that second variant, you need capacity in production.Read more
- ResourcesGlossary of data, AI and Power BI termsWhat is a service principal, row-level security, a semantic model, text-to-SQL or RAG? Short, clear definitions of terms around data, Power BI and AI.Read more
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