Azure AD B2B: New updates make cross-business collab easy

[Alex Simons (AZURE)]

First published on CloudBlogs on Feb, 01 2017
Howdy folks, I've been looking forward to writing this blog post for a while! Those of you who follow the blog know that Azure AD B2B collaboration is a set of capabilities that makes it easy for IT pros and information workers to invite people from any organization in the world to collaborate online. The goal of Azure AD B2B is to enable organizations of all sizes and industries - even those with complex compliance and governance requirements - to work easily and securely with collaborators around the world. I'm excited to let you know that we've just turned on a boat load of new enhancements in our B2B public preview. Millions of users and thousands customers have been using the public preview of our B2B Collaboration capabilities since we first announced the public preview. Those customers have been incredibly generous with their time and feedback. All of the enhancements we're announcing today are based their suggestions and we can't thank them enough for their partnership.

Key new features of Azure AD B2B Collaboration

In today's release, you'll find the following new features and functionality:

1. UX enhancements to the B2B admin experience , including the ability for admins to invite B2B users to the directory or to any group or application.
2. B2B self-service invitation capabilities in the Access Panel , so information workers can invite B2B users to any self-service group or application they manage.
3. Ability to invite a user with any email address to collaborate. Whether a user has an Office365 or on-premises Exchange email address, an outlook.com email address, or any social email address, he/she can now seamlessly access the invited organization with inline, lightweight creation of an Azure AD or Microsoft Account.
4. Professional, tenant branded invitation emails.
5. The option to build customize onboarding experience using our invitation APIs.
6. The ability to require and provide MFA for B2B guest accounts.
7. Ability to delegate responsibility for inviting B2B guest accounts to non-administrators.
8. PowerShell support for B2B.
9. Auditing and reporting capabilities.

Fig 1: A custom branded invitation, one of our most highly requested features

We are also releasing updated, detailed documentation to help you understand the capabilities really well and guide you in using them as efficiently as possible. Our next milestone is to take the service to Generally Availability. So please send us any final or suggestions you have ASAP. We will put them all to good use!

Give it a try!

Getting started is simple. Go to the user list in your tenant and add any external email address today!

Fig 2: Inviting a B2B Guest User in the new Azure Portal

And like always, we would love to receive and feedback our suggestions you have in our Microsoft Tech Community !

Learn More

There's much more detail about the new Azure AD B2B Collaboration features in our updated documentation . Dive in and let us know if you have any questions! And if you haven't seen it yet, check out our Ignite Azure AD B2B collaboration talk , too. Best Regards, Alex Simons (@Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons ) Director of Program Management Microsoft Identity Division