Microsoft Accounts won't be supported in Entra ID for Customers?

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Microsoft Accounts won't be supported in Entra ID for Customers?

Shannon McC 31

Am I reading the documentation correctly and that Entra (External) ID For Customers might not support Microsoft Accounts? It seems that Google accounts will be fully supported with single-sign-on, but not Microsoft Accounts!

Will it be possible for a single Entra tenant that can have a mixture of people signing up with self-managed passwords and others using Microsoft accounts or even full Entra accounts as guests from other, full, tenants?

For the situation I have, which will be a desktop and web application that needs to support 'unmanaged' customer users with self-sign-in (and ideally all the nice branding control of Entra ID for Customers0, but also ideally would handle both Microsoft accounts and accounts belonging to full EntraID tenants (because many of the users will have their own Entra IDs belonging to their companies), would Entra ID for Customers be the right choice?

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Answer 1

Shweta Mathur 30,301 Microsoft Employee Moderator

Hi @Shannon McC ,

Thanks for reaching out.

Entra (External) ID For Customers might not support Microsoft Accounts? It seems that Google accounts will be fully supported with single-sign-on, but not Microsoft Accounts!

Microsoft Accounts are fully supported in Entra ID for customers. However, you do not require any configuration to set up to allow users to sign in with Microsoft Accounts.

You can directly sign up the user with their Microsoft Id which will send them a code to create user in CIAM tenant.

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Will it be possible for a single Entra tenant that can have a mixture of people signing up with self-managed passwords and others using Microsoft accounts or even full Entra accounts as guests from other, full, tenants?

Yes, External ID for customers allow to sign into application available to multiple consumers using different identity providers Google, Facebook as well as from Microsoft accounts and Microsoft Entra Id accounts.

For the situation I have, which will be a desktop and web application that needs to support 'unmanaged' customer users with self-sign-in (and ideally all the nice branding control of Entra ID for Customers0, but also ideally would handle both Microsoft accounts and accounts belonging to full EntraID tenants (because many of the users will have their own Entra IDs belonging to their companies), would Entra ID for Customers be the right choice?

Yes, customer identity access management (CIAM) solution is best solution which allows businesses to build customer-facing applications and then allow anyone to sign-up into those applications with no restrictions on user account.

Hope this will help.

Thanks,

Shweta

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Shannon McC 31 Reputation points

2023-12-13T22:24:23.6333333+00:00

Great to hear! Looking further, I'm wondering if it's the self-service sign-up user flow that has the limitation, rather than the traditional B2B-style account invite.

For a 'normal' directory tenant setting up the user flow, we have:

but for a customer one we have:

Which suggests we can't (yet) have self-sign-up for Customer accounts using MS Accounts. (There's a note at <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/external-id/customers/how-to-user-flow-sign-up-sign-in-customers#:~:text=Microsoft%20Entra%20ID%20Sign%20up%20option%20is%20unavailable> about it too, saying that federation isn't used.)

Hopefully, this is just a temporary limitation! (Seems sensible for MS to support their own accounts.)

I'll also consider whether a normal Entra ID tenant will work fine for our scenario anyway. Thanks!
Shweta Mathur 30,301 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2023-12-14T05:38:02.3066667+00:00

Shannon McC

As this feature is in preview, new features are evolving gradually.

The screenshot I mentioned in above answer is External ID for customers only in which Identity providers tab has Microsoft Accounts.

However, I replicate the scenario in my lab by creating s user flow and was able to sign in successfully using Microsoft accounts and Entra ID accounts.

Thanks,

Shweta
DE 65 Reputation points

2023-12-16T07:10:14.2033333+00:00

I actually have this posted as almost the same question - but specifically the problem is that User Flows does not show Microsoft Accounts as an option you can select (bug I assume?) so Microsoft Account does not show up as an option on login.

This is EXTREMELY basic and assuming is a bug, since it would be something that should be available as an option to choose - "since it is an automatically available identity provider" in settings.

So... even though it is an automatically available Identity Provider, there is no way to use it.
Shannon McC 31 Reputation points

2023-12-17T23:19:43.6233333+00:00

DE, while that is my experience with the current preview too, my hope is (based on Shewata Mathur's comment(s)) is that it will be fully enabled before the service leaves preview.

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Microsoft Accounts won't be supported in Entra ID for Customers?

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