Azure user appears after first login

Question

Hello guys,
My customer has an Azure tenant assigned to his Active Directory. When they are browsing users in Azure Portal there is limited number of users there (like 20) while in the company AD they have hundreds of users. Recently they have realized that user gets created and accessible in Azure AD through Azure Portal only after user has logged in for the first time.
Is this behaviour by design?
This is problem for them, because they have custom application developed and hosted in Azure which makes use of Microsoft Graph to implement people picker. Picker is querying Azure AD to find users, but as you can imagine - they only get users which are created in Azure AD after first successfull login.
Regards
Tomasz

Answer 1

Dear James,
Let me try to explain.
The customer is a big company (1000+ users in local Active Directory). Now they are using Azure more and more. The project I'm working on is hosted on Azure as an App Service. Now they want to enable all users to use this application. In order to do that we've developed some code which uses Graph to query Azure Active Directory (actually an app registed in AAD) and retrieves users based on name or e-mail (so they can be found and invited). The customer now complains that only limited subset of users is returned by Graph query.
I've done some investigation and it looks like the problem lies somewhere else. When I go to the Azure Portal to see all users in Azure tenant I can only see around 20 users. These are the users that can be searched through Graph. But I cannot see all these other 980+ users. I asked one of the users which was not visible in Azure Portal to login to the portal. When user did first login, I returned to the Azure Portal and voila - the user can be seen in Azure Portal and is findable through Graph query.
I hope you know what I mean?