Imagine your company has Tenant A (Europe) and Tenant B (US). You want European users (Tenant A) to access apps in Tenant B without manual guest invitations
This is what Cross-tenant synchronization allows us to do, and its GA as of now
So practically we :
- You define Tenant A as a source and Tenant B as a target.
- You enable cross-tenant sync inbound on Tenant B (“Allow users sync into this tenant”) for Tenant A.
- In Tenant A, you configure a sync configuration: only certain groups (e.g. “GlobalEmployees”) are in scope.
- Users in “GlobalEmployees” in Tenant A are automatically provisioned in Tenant B as B2B users.
- If someone leaves “GlobalEmployees”, or their role changes, those changes propagate.
- The user’s login remains in Tenant A; they don’t get a separate password in Tenant B.
Other things to know
- Cross-tenant synchronization is a provisioning service that automates the creation, update, and deletion (lifecycle) of B2B collaboration users from one tenant (source) into another tenant (target).
- In effect: rather than manually inviting users from Tenant A to Tenant B as guests, you configure a trust+sync so that certain users in Tenant A are automatically provisioned (and kept in sync) in Tenant B.
- It works in a push model: the source tenant pushes the user objects into, the target does not pull.
- It is built on top of the existing B2B collaboration infrastructure (so the synchronized users are represented as B2B guest or member objects in the target) and uses the cross-tenant access settings for trust and policies.
First steps configuration :
From Entra ID, you would go to external identities
Then to cross tenant settings
Click Add Organization and in the search bar add tenant ID of the target tenant with which we want to have cross tenant sync
The video below from Microsoft is more than enough when it comes to first set up of this config and how to add users, and their experience they might have during the process based on policies your company would have.
This video below was at the time this feature was in preview