What is self-service sign-up for Azure Active Directory?
This article explains how to use self-service sign-up to populate an organization in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), part of Microsoft Entra. If you want to take over a domain name from an unmanaged Azure AD organization, see Take over an unmanaged tenant as administrator.
Why use self-service sign-up?
- Get customers to services they want faster
- Create email-based offers for a service
- Create email-based sign-up flows that quickly allow users to create identities using their easy-to-remember work email aliases
- A self-service-created Azure AD tenant can be turned into a managed tenant that can be used for other services
Terms and definitions
- Self-service sign-up: This is the method by which a user signs up for a cloud service and has an identity automatically created for them in Azure AD based on their email domain.
- Unmanaged Azure AD tenant: This is the tenant where that identity is created. An unmanaged tenant is a tenant that has no global administrator.
- Email-verified user: This is a type of user account in Azure AD. A user who has an identity created automatically after signing up for a self-service offer is known as an email-verified user. An email-verified user is a regular member of a tenant tagged with creationmethod=EmailVerified.
How do I control self-service settings?
Admins have two self-service controls today. They can control whether:
- Users can join the tenant via email
- Users can license themselves for applications and services
How can I control these capabilities?
An admin can configure these capabilities using the following Azure AD cmdlet Set-MsolCompanySettings parameters:
- AllowEmailVerifiedUsers controls whether users can join the tenant by email validation. To join, the user must have an email address in a domain which matches one of the verified domains in the tenant. This setting is applied company-wide for all domains in the tenant. If you set that parameter to $false, no email-verified user can join the tenant.
- AllowAdHocSubscriptions controls the ability for users to perform self-service sign-up. If you set that parameter to $false, no user can perform self-service sign-up.
AllowEmailVerifiedUsers and AllowAdHocSubscriptions are tenant-wide settings that can be applied to a managed or unmanaged tenant. Here's an example where:
- You administer a tenant with a verified domain such as contoso.com
- You use B2B collaboration from a different tenant to invite a user that does not already exist (userdoesnotexist@contoso.com) in the home tenant of contoso.com
- The home tenant has the AllowEmailVerifiedUsers turned on
If the preceding conditions are true, then a member user is created in the home tenant, and a B2B guest user is created in the inviting tenant.
For more information on Flow and Power Apps trial sign-ups, see the following articles:
How do the controls work together?
These two parameters can be used in conjunction to define more precise control over self-service sign-up. For example, the following command will allow users to perform self-service sign-up, but only if those users already have an account in Azure AD (in other words, users who would need an email-verified account to be created first cannot perform self-service sign-up):
Set-MsolCompanySettings -AllowEmailVerifiedUsers $false -AllowAdHocSubscriptions $true
The following flowchart explains the different combinations for these parameters and the resulting conditions for the tenant and self-service sign-up.
The details of this setting can be retrieved by the following PowerShell cmdlet Get-MsolCompanyInformation. For more information on this, see Get-MsolCompanyInformation.
Get-MsolCompanyInformation | Select AllowEmailVerifiedUsers, AllowAdHocSubscriptions
For more information and examples of how to use these parameters, see Set-MsolCompanySettings.