Series: Getting Started & Tenant Foundations
Before anyone can open Fabric and start working, they need two things: an account, and a license attached to it. If some of those people work outside your company, there’s a third piece to plan for.
Licenses live in Microsoft 365 admin, not Fabric.
Fabric doesn’t have its own separate licensing screen — you assign every license, Fabric included, from the Microsoft 365 admin center, the same place you’d manage Exchange or Teams. Easy to miss if you came into this world through the Fabric admin portal. Save yourself a search: bookmark the Microsoft 365 admin center alongside the Fabric admin portal, since you’ll need both within your first week.
Two ways to hand out a license.
From Active users, open a person’s profile and update Licenses and apps — good for one-off changes. From Billing, Licenses, pick a product and assign it to up to twenty people or a whole group at once — better for onboarding a team. Group-based licensing in Microsoft Entra ID can automate this further, so new hires get the right license the moment they join a group. That automation is worth setting up early, because manually licensing every new employee is exactly the kind of task that gets forgotten during a busy onboarding week.
Adding your own employees is the easy part.
Create the account under Active users, assign a license, and mailbox, OneDrive, and Fabric access all follow automatically — no separate Fabric-specific step required. It’s genuinely a five-minute process once you’ve done it a couple of times, which is part of why the guest workflow below feels so much more involved by comparison.
Guests are invited, not created.
For someone outside your organization, you invite them as a B2B guest through Microsoft Entra ID, Users, Invite external user. They sign in with their own existing credentials, so you’re never managing an external password. That also means you’re never responsible for resetting a forgotten password for someone who doesn’t even work for you.
Guests still need somewhere to sit license-wise.
A guest can view content sitting on paid capacity with just a free account, but for Pro or Premium-per-user workspaces, someone has to cover the license — either you assign one from your tenant, or their own organization does under a bring-your-own-license arrangement. Sort out which side is paying before the guest shows up expecting access, since discovering the gap mid-project is an awkward conversation to have.
Two switches have to agree.
Guest access only works if both the Fabric admin portal’s “guest users can access Fabric” setting and Microsoft Entra’s external collaboration and cross-tenant access settings allow it; flipping one on without the other just leads to confused support tickets. When a guest reports they can’t see anything, checking both switches together is usually faster than troubleshooting either one in isolation.
Bottom line: check the Errors and Issues tab after any bulk license assignment — that’s where failed assignments and exhausted license pools show up. And treat guest access as a policy decision, not just a checkbox; tightening it later is always harder than starting careful.
To learn more: Assign or unassign licenses for users · Assign licenses to users by group membership · What is Microsoft Entra B2B collaboration? · Quickstart: Add a guest user and send an invitation · Distribute Power BI content to external guest users with Microsoft Entra B2B (all Microsoft Learn)
This post is part of the Fabric & Power BI Essentials series — see the full series intro and article list there.
← Previous: Fabric Licensing Explained: Per-User, Capacity-Based, and Trial Options | Next →: Fabric Tenant Settings: What to Enable, Disable, and Ignore at Launch
