Power BI External Access – Workspace shell access denied & navigation bar missing for external Contributor

Question

Hello Power BI community,

We are encountering an issue with the new Power BI External Access (cross-tenant) experience where external users are unable to access the workspace shell and do not see the Power BI navigation bar, despite having correct permissions.

Scenario

User is authenticated via the new external access flow using:
https://app.powerbi.com/home?ctid=<external-tenant-id>&experience=power-bi

The user is a Contributor on a workspace in the external tenant.

Direct access to reports and datasets works correctly.

However:

The Power BI navigation bar / workspace shell is missing in this tenant.

Expected behavior

As a Contributor, the external user should be able to access the workspace shell UI and see the navigation bar, consistent with behavior observed in other external tenants.

Actual behavior

Workspace shell access is denied.

Navigation bar is suppressed.

User is forced into “My workspace” despite valid Contributor permissions.

Additional observations

The same user and access method works as expected in other external tenants.

This appears to be tenant-specific, not user- or report-specific.

Focus Mode is not enabled.

This does not appear to be an embed or app context.

Permissions have been verified and re-applied.

Hypothesis

This appears to be related to:

Tenant-level restrictions or legacy settings affecting external workspace shell access, or

Inconsistent feature rollout for the new External Access shell, causing the workspace container UI to be suppressed.

Request

Could you please help clarify:

Whether external users are expected to have access to the workspace shell and navigation bar when granted Contributor permissions in a cross-tenant scenario

If there are known tenant-level settings, limitations, or rollout dependencies that could suppress the workspace shell UI for external users

Whether this behavior aligns with the intended design of the new External Access experience, or if additional configuration is required to enable the full navigation shell

Thank you for your assistance,

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Moved from Microsoft 365 and Office | Other

Answer 1

Post/ask in the Power BI community:

https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/