Howdy folks,
If you follow the blog, you know that Azure AD B2B Collaboration makes it incredibly easy and secure to share applications and collaborate seamlessly across company boundaries. What you might not know is that its one of our fastest growing features and more than one million new users are invited to collaborate each month using Azure AD B2B!
Weve been hard at work to make B2B Collaboration even more seamless and inclusive. Our vision is to enable you to collaborate with people from any organization in the world, whether or not they have Azure AD or even an IT department. Were reducing friction during invitation redemption and eliminating the proliferation of credentials by enabling your partners to bring their own existing identities to collaborate with you!
Today, Im excited to unveil the next major step on this visionthe public preview of support for Google ID’s! Weve supported folks using Azure AD and Microsoft Accounts (or signing up for one just in time) until now, and yes, weve heard your enthusiasm about federation with non-Microsoft identity providers. Im thrilled to announce that Google is the first third-party identity provider that Azure AD supports!
Enabling Google federation makes your invited Gmail user’s experience more seamless. After you have set up B2B Google federation for your organization, invited Gmail users can use their Google identity to sign in and collaborate. They no longer need to create an Azure AD account or Microsoft Account to access the apps and resources youre sharing with them!
(Important note: Currently we only support Google ID’s with the @gmail.com extension).
You can enable Google identities in Organizational relationshipsa new administration experience that lets you manage all settings related to external collaboration!
Under Organizational relationships, you can view a list of users from other organizations and create customized Terms of use and Access reviews policies for guest users. As we build out more functionality, you will find additional federated authentication methods for B2B users and other collaboration features under Organizational relationships.
Go ahead and dive into the documentation to try out B2B Google federation! Let us know what you think by taking our brief survey. And as always,connect with usfor any discussion or send us yourfeedback and suggestions.You know were listening!
Best Regards,
Alex Simons (@Twitter:@Alex_A_Simons)
Director of Program Management
Microsoft Identity Division