PL-300 Manage and secure Power BI Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Create a new user account in your Microsoft Entra ID for the external user and assign a Power BI Pro license.

  Why it's wrong here

  Provisioning a dedicated user account in Microsoft Entra ID for an external viewer is wasteful and administratively heavy: you would be paying for an extra Power BI Pro license (approximately $10 per user/month) and managing a credential that the external user must use to sign in. This approach also escalates the organizational security surface because the account is controlled by your tenant yet used by an unmanaged outsider, and the external user is forced to adopt an identity that is not their own. It is technically possible, but it is an unnecessary licensing and lifecycle cost compared to simply publishing a fully public link.

• ✗

  Share the report directly with the external user's email address.

  Why it's wrong here

  Directly sharing a report to an external user's email address in the Power BI service will not work unless the recipient already has a Power BI account and can sign in with an identity that your tenant recognizes. For a person outside your organization, Power BI sharing triggers an Microsoft Entra ID/B2B guest invitation by default, but even after accepting, the guest must have a free Power BI license (or your org must have enabled external sharing with free licenses) to open the report in the service. If the workspace resides in a Premium capacity, the recipient still needs to sign in, and many external users simply will not be able to access it without the manual B2B setup.

• ✗

  Invite the external user as a guest in Microsoft Entra ID, then share the report.

  Why it's wrong here

  Inviting the external user as a guest in Microsoft Entra ID and then sharing the report does solve the identity issue, but it still requires the guest to authenticate with their own work, school, or personal account every time they open the report. Even with B2B collaboration in place, the guest needs at least a free Power BI license (and a Pro license if the report is deployed in a non-Premium workspace) before any row-level or app sharing can surface the content. This approach also puts the burden of tenant-to-tenant trust, consent, and license management on the guest's organization, which may be uncooperative or incompatible with your sharing deadline.

• ✓

  Use the 'Publish to web' option to generate an embed code and send the link to the external user.

  Why this is correct

  Publishing to web is the only option that bypasses all authentication and licensing requirements entirely: it generates a publicly accessible embed code and a URL that anyone with the link can open in a browser, with no sign-in or Power BI license needed. This exactly matches the requirement of letting an external user view report content without credentials, but it is also risky because the report is effectively published on the internet for anyone who discovers the link to see, including potentially sensitive data. In production, this feature is appropriate only for non-confidential, public-facing content, and an administrator should ensure the tenant-level 'Publish to web' setting is allowed before using it.

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