Licensing for Tenants using B2B functionality

Question

Hi,

My understanding is that B2B is now part of Microsoft Entra External ID, but specifically in the Workforce tenant type (not external). I am investigating options for how we provide access to our apps for our customers - the apps will be per customer, allowing sign in from select customer users and select users from my company.

I believe I could setup a Microsoft Entra External ID Workforce tenant per customer, utilise B2B and then setup the application registrations within that tenant to manage authentication. Majority of customers will have their own Microsoft tenant, but B2B will enable support for some other identity providers if required in future and as a fall back local user signup.

The following is the example tenant structure/setup I am planning:

• <My Company Tenant> (already on P1 or P2 license)
  • Additional Workforce Tenant - Customer1 (by default created on free license)
    • <B2B sync for appropriate users from My company Tenant>
    • <B2B sync for appropriate users from Customer1's company tenant>
  • Additional Workforce Tenant - Customer2 (by default created on free license)
    • <B2B sync for appropriate users from My company Tenant>
    • <B2B sync for appropriate users from Customer2's company tenant>

For this to work I want to understand which tenants would require an Entra ID license to support B2B. I believe the customer's company tenants would need P1 so that they can configure which users are automatically synchronised to the 'additional workforce tenant' - can this be confirmed please?

Would the additional workforce tenant need a P1 as well? I only need synchronisation from the customer company tenant and from my own into this tenant. I am hoping these can utilise the MAU billing model rather than incurring the P1 or P2 Entra ID license costs.

Thanks

Answer 1

@D-6386

Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Entra ID. From above description I could understand that you are looking to setup 2 workforce tenants and have B2B collaboration with customer 1 and 2 respectively. Also, you want to allow user from your tenant to access the apps in both the tenants.

Please do correct me if this not the ask by responding in the comments section.

You need paid Microsoft license plan to create an additional Microsoft Entra tenant (workforce). Microsoft paid cloud services, such as Office 365, EMS require licenses. These licenses are assigned to each user who needs access to the services. Microsoft Entra ID is the underlying infrastructure that supports identity management for all Microsoft cloud services and stores information about license assignment states for users.

The billing for each external user would be done MAU basis.

In your Microsoft Entra tenant, guest user collaboration usage is billed based on the count of unique guest users with authentication activity within a calendar month. This model replaces the 1:5 ratio billing model, which allowed up to five guest users for each Microsoft Entra ID P1 or P2 license in your tenant. When your tenant is linked to a subscription and you use External ID features to collaborate with guest users, you're automatically billed using the MAU-based billing model.

• So only one workforce tenant with P1 or P2 plan would be needed.

If you don't have any further queries and the suggestion above answers your ask, please "Accept the answer", This will help us and others in the community as well.

Thanks,

Akshay Kaushik