Microsoft Entra External ID

With Microsoft Entra External ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) External Identities, you can collaborate with partners and guests (B2B) or add customer identity and access management (CIAM) to your customer-facing apps (B2C).

Microsoft Entra External ID refers to all the ways you can securely interact with users outside of your organization. If you want to collaborate with partners, distributors, suppliers, or vendors, you can share your resources and define how your internal users can access external organizations. If you're a developer creating consumer-facing apps, you can manage your customers' identity experiences. With External ID, external users can "bring their own identities." Whether they have a corporate or government-issued digital identity, or an unmanaged social identity like Google or Facebook, they can use their own credentials to sign in. The external user’s identity provider manages their identity, and you manage access to your apps with Microsoft Entra ID or Azure AD B2C to keep your resources protected.

Microsoft Entra External ID for customers (CIAM): Microsoft Entra ID for customers is Microsoft’s new customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution. For organizations and businesses that want to make their public-facing applications available to consumers, Microsoft Entra ID makes it easy to add CIAM features like self-service registration, personalized sign-in experiences, and customer account management. Because these CIAM capabilities are built into Microsoft Entra ID, you also benefit from platform features like enhanced security, compliance, and scalability.

Microsoft Entra External ID for partners (B2B): B2B collaboration - Collaborate with external users by letting them use their preferred identity to sign in to your Microsoft applications or other enterprise applications (SaaS apps, custom-developed apps, etc.). B2B collaboration users are represented in your directory, typically as guest users. B2B direct connect - Establish a mutual, two-way trust with another Microsoft Entra organization for seamless collaboration. B2B direct connect currently supports Teams shared channels, enabling external users to access your resources from within their home instances of Teams. B2B direct connect users aren't represented in your directory, but they're visible from within the Teams shared channel and can be monitored in Teams admin center reports.