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In Microsoft 365 you can utilize cross-tenant synchronization to automate external account sync based on Azure B2B collaboration. This provides a more seamless authentication and usage across trusted Microsoft 365 tenants. This is adding tremendous value to managing Microsoft 365 multi-tenant organizations which have to cope with multiple tenants due to legal, compliance and other requirements.

Cross-tenant sync enables to automate users account sync. The account access is not limited to just Microsoft 365 apps, it’s going beyond that. So, in case you have further apps in your Microsoft 365 and/or Azure AD tenant you can configure them to provide access in this Azure B2B scenario. You can configure access to accounts from another Azure AD tenant to specific apps. In a recent Microsoft 365 message center notification is was announced to be generally available.

Conclusion, opinion and summary

Microsoft is adding more and more multi-tenant capabilities for a more sophisticated communication, collaboration and administration. Cross-tenant sync does not require admins in trusted (AAD/Entra) multi-tenant environments to create, update or delete manually guest accounts in each tenant. It enables for automation.

Based on my current experience from the field it works very well and some inconsistencies from the preview were fixed. Or the did not show up in the most recent tests. The only thing you should keep in mind, but it is documented, it the fact that you need to be patient at the start because it can take rather longer to get the sync working smoothly. In my tests there were no hiccups or issues it just takes a lot of time that it starts in both ways. E.g. user accounts in both tenants showed up quickly. However it took really long in tenant B that the synced users are showed up as contact objects for the global address list (Exchange Online).

Resources

• Microsoft 365 message center ID MC600740
• Microsoft 365 roadmap feature ID 109568
• Seamless Application Access and Lifecycle Management for Multi-tenant Azure AD Organizations – Microsoft Community Hub
• What is a cross-tenant synchronization in Azure Active Directory? – Microsoft Entra | Microsoft Learn
• Cross-tenant synchronization – YouTube