Add users outside of our organization to azure devops using their own Visual Studio enterprise license

Question

We have a contractor working for us that has his own Visual Studio Enterprise subscription. We want to add this user to our Azure Devops organization using his own Visual studio license ( i.e grant this user "Visual studio Enterprise subscription" access level using his own Visual studio license...we will prefer not to issue him one of our own visual studio license )
Could you please let us know how to do this ?

Answer 1

Here's how to add external users: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/accounts/add-external-user?view=azure-devops

Regarding licensing, I'm not 100% sure on this but it does state that Visual Studio licensed users are detected automatically so should not be billed but you may need to switch on multi-organisation users in your settings.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/billing/buy-basic-access-add-users?view=azure-devops

Answer 2

Unfortunately questions related to Azure DevOps is out of scope for this forum. At this time you'll need to continue to post over on the forums that Azure DevOps does support on Stack Overflow.

In terms of your actual question I believe you should be fine provided the contractor logs into VS using their email address and that email address is tied to their VS Enterprise license AND you have allowed external users to connect to your Azure DevOps instance AND you add their email address to your list of users. That's how I have historically done it without any issues. But even then I used my company email in Azure DevOps, my personal email for VS Enterprise and just ensured that when I connected to DevOps I used my company email credentials. But that was a couple of years ago.