What changes in October 2021 for guest-users?

Question

Hi,

I posted this question in the wrong forum, so they recommend me to do it here at the right place:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/external-identities/user-properties

In that site above I read the following information:

Important
Starting October 2021, Microsoft will no longer support the redemption of invitations by creating unmanaged Azure AD accounts and tenants for B2B collaboration scenarios. In preparation, we encourage customers to opt into email one-time passcode authentication. We welcome your feedback on this public preview feature and are excited to create even more ways to collaborate.

What does that mean in detail? What ist ending in October 2021?

At the moment we use several 365-E1-accounts and invite other people to be guests in our organisation. Together we can use e.g. Microsoft Teams. That works good for us. The guests just have registered on microsoft.com, but do not have a licensed account which produces costs. They arent't part of an other organisation which pay for them, too. They have just a free account on microsoft.com.

In other words we do not use B2B exactly, but such as User2B.

Does the warning above mean that such guests we work with, will not be able to sign in or use there guest-account after October 2021 any more?

Thanks for answering!

Malte

Answer 1

There will be no changes for your scenario. The paragraph you've cited applies to the so-called "viral signup" scenarios, where a user from a given organization can "self sign up" for Azure AD and in some cases create an unmanaged Azure AD instance. It does not affect anyone using free accounts such as @harsh.com .com or @Karima ben .com. More details here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/enterprise-users/directory-self-service-signup
The other part mentioned above, triggering a one-time passcode flow, will only apply to users that are "not recognized" by the Azure AD authentication subsystem, as in users that do not have a valid Azure AD or MicrosoftID account. There's detailed information here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/external-identities/one-time-passcode#when-does-a-guest-user-get-a-one-time-passcode