Business-to-business features in Microsoft Entra External ID for working alongside partner organisations. Direct connect lets people share Teams channels with no guest account needed, whereas collaboration brings partners into your tenant as guests.
Also called business-to-business.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains B2B in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Document Intelligence add-on capabilities
Extra Document Intelligence options switched on with the features query parameter: barcodes, formulas, keyValuePairs, languages, ocrHighResolution, queryFields and styleFont.
- Microsoft Entra External ID
Platform for external identities from Microsoft, spanning B2B collaboration and customer (CIAM) tenants. New customers use it in place of Azure AD B2C.
- CONNECT
In SQL Server, the right to open a connection to a database. Fabric's equivalent is Read permission on an item, which allows connecting to a warehouse or SQL endpoint but not querying anything in it.
- Share
In OpenSharing, the container you fill with tables, views, volumes, models and notebooks for recipients. You need
CREATE SHAREon the metastore to make one; add a schema and all its assets, including later ones, go with history. - Tenant
A trusted, dedicated Microsoft Entra ID instance that stores the users, groups and app registrations of one organisation. A subscription trusts only a single tenant, although a tenant can be trusted by several subscriptions.
Related terms
- Collaboration restrictions
By default B2B invitations can be sent to any domain. This external collaboration setting changes that by holding a list of domains, used either as an allow list or as a block list.
- Configurable redemption
Lets administrators reorder the identity providers that guests are offered when they redeem a B2B invitation, instead of the default order. It is on the Redemption order tab of cross-tenant access settings.
- Cross-tenant access settings
Determine, in Microsoft Entra, how far your tenant trusts and collaborates over B2B with other tenants, for both incoming and outgoing access.
- Domainless federation
Normally a SAML/WS-Fed identity provider set up for B2B is matched on the guest's email domain. With this option that check is skipped and guests are sent to the provider by its issuer URI instead, which helps when a partner's users have email addresses on domains other than the provider's.
- EDI
Electronic data interchange, the business-to-business exchange of documents, which Azure handles with integration accounts in Logic Apps.
- Email one-time passcode
A way to sign in using a short-lived code sent by email. B2B guests fall back on it when no other sign-in route works, and it is turned on by default.
- Guest user
Entra account whose
UserTypeis Guest, created when a B2B invitation is accepted; its UPN takes the #EXT# form, but that is not what the person signs in with. - Internal guest
Before B2B, partners were often given an account in the host tenant marked with a UserType of Guest. Such users can be invited to B2B collaboration so they sign in with credentials of their own, and their object stays the same.