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Microsoft Entra B2B collaboration API and customization

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Applies to: Green circle with a white check mark symbol. Workforce tenants White circle with a gray X symbol. External tenants (learn more)

With the Microsoft Graph REST API, you can customize the invitation process in a way that works best for your organization.

Capabilities of the invitation API

The API offers the following capabilities:

  1. Invite an external user with any email address.

    "invitedUserDisplayName": "Taylor"
"invitedUserEmailAddress": "taylor@fabrikam.com"

  2. Customize where you want your users to land after they accept their invitation.

    "inviteRedirectUrl": "https://myapps.microsoft.com/"

  3. Choose to send the standard invitation mail through us.

    "sendInvitationMessage": true

    with a message to the recipient that you can customize.

    "customizedMessageBody": "Hello Sam, let's collaborate!"

  4. And choose to cc: people you want to keep in the loop about your inviting this collaborator.

  5. Or completely customize your invitation and onboarding workflow by choosing not to send notifications through Microsoft Entra ID.

    "sendInvitationMessage": false

    In this case, you get back a redemption URL from the API that you can embed in an email template, IM, or other distribution method of your choice.

  6. Finally, if you're an admin, you can choose to invite the user as member.

    "invitedUserType": "Member"

Determine if a user was already invited to your directory

You can use the invitation API to determine if a user already exists in your resource tenant. This can be useful when you're developing an app that uses the invitation API to invite a user. If the user already exists in your resource directory, they won't receive an invitation, so you can run a query first to determine whether the email already exists as a UPN or other sign-in property.

  1. Make sure the user's email domain isn't part of your resource tenant's verified domain.

  2. In the resource tenant, use the following get user query where {0} is the email address you're inviting:

    “userPrincipalName eq '{0}' or mail eq '{0}' or proxyAddresses/any(x:x eq 'SMTP:{0}') or signInNames/any(x:x eq '{0}') or otherMails/any(x:x eq '{0}')"

Authorization model

The API can be run in the following authorization modes:

App + User mode

In this mode, whoever is using the API needs to have the permissions to be create B2B invitations.

App only mode

In app only context, the app needs the User.Invite.All scope for the invitation to succeed.

For more information, see: https://developer.microsoft.com/graph/docs/authorization/permission_scopes

PowerShell

You can use PowerShell to add and invite external users to an organization easily. Create an invitation using the cmdlet:

New-MgInvitation

You can use the following options:

  • -InvitedUserDisplayName
  • -InvitedUserEmailAddress
  • -SendInvitationMessage
  • -InvitedUserMessageInfo

Invitation status

After you send an external user an invitation, you can use the Get-MgBetaUser cmdlet to see if they've accepted it. The following properties of Get-MgBetaUser are populated when an external user is sent an invitation:

  • externalUserState indicates whether the invitation is PendingAcceptance or Accepted.
  • externalUserStateChangeDateTime shows the timestamp for the latest change to the externalUserState property.

You can use the Filter option to filter the results by externalUserState. The example below shows how to filter results to show only users who have a pending invitation. The example also shows the Format-List option, which lets you specify the properties to display.

Get-MgBetaUser -Filter "externalUserState eq 'PendingAcceptance'" | Format-List -Property DisplayName,UserPrincipalName,externalUserState,externalUserStateChangeDateTime

Note

Make sure you have the latest version of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module

See also

Check out the invitation API reference in https://developer.microsoft.com/graph/docs/api-reference/v1.0/resources/invitation.

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