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Entra External ID for Customers is a new Azure Tenant type that allows you to create digital identities for your customers.

Use cases

  • B2B partners. You can create a dedicated customer tenant for your partners and give them access to your applications, manage users and groups in the tenant without partners’ access to your organisation (workforce tenant). Your data is fully secured and isolated.
  • Online services and web shops for your retail. Full self-service is available to sign up/sign in and manage their accounts. You can also use social logins like Google or Facebook.
  • Product pages, helpdesk and support. Keep customer engagement and provide them with the best experience.
  • Cross-device authentication. User-friendly experience to log in on the TV screen, medical devices, or any other IoT where you can display a QR code or PIN to log in.

What is Entra External ID for Customers?

In simple words, it is a new tenant type. From now you can decide Workforce or Customer type. It is a new tenant type to create - so for customers, it is separate - and not connected with your organisation’s tenant. Please remember that the service is still in preview mode - but only till the 15th of May, so only limited features may be available. Service will be GA soon!!

GA Announcement

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How can you start testing Entra External ID for Customers?

You can create your tenant by following instructions from Microsoft documentation.

Are you interested in possible features?

Check the link to the supported features.

You can now test with the preview version of Entra External ID for Customers:

  • Google and Facebook social login,
  • Token enrichment with group ids,
  • Guest user as the application owner,
  • Limitate user access to specific applications by assignment,
  • Native Authentication for local accounts (not social logins),
  • Manage security levels for your customers. You can use MFA, passwordless (today limited to email OTP), or other security features to protect your customers’ accounts: Smart Lockout, Conditional Access, and more in the future.

pros&cons

Pricing

There is a 50% discount till May 2025 for the P1 license - instead of 0.03$ per MAU (Monthly active user), you will pay around 0.016$ per MAU. Is there any alternative? Yes, you can use B2C - but remember that B2C is a different service with different features. In the official documentation, Microsoft mentions Entra Verified ID service - now, with Entra External ID as the same tenant, we will get a dedicated Verified ID service for the customer tenants. We will see in the future. I keep my fingers crossed for this!

Demo

Please test my demo application Factorlabs Portal - External ID

or build by Microsoft Woodgrove Demo