Microsoft 365 Multitenant Organization People Search
Article
The multitenant Organization (MTO) People Search is a collaboration feature that enables search and discovery of people across multiple tenants. A tenant admin can enable cross-tenant synchronization that allows users to be synced to another tenant and be discoverable in its global address list. Once enabled, users are able to search and discover synced user profiles from the other tenant and view their corresponding people cards.
Fig 1: Microsoft Entra cross tenant synchronization illustration
Example scenario
Megan's user account has been synced from the Fabrikam tenant to the target tenant, Contoso. Nestor from Contoso would like to search and view Megan's people card in Teams. After Megan's account has been synced, Nestor can search and discover Megan's people card in any of the Microsoft 365 apps.
Fig 2: User can view a limited people card
Known limitations
The current experience provides limited information on the people card (basic contact information, job title and office location).
Prerequisites
To test the MTO People Search feature, it's assumed that you already have the following settings:
Two Microsoft Entra / Microsoft 365 tenants
Both tenants have the Microsoft Entra Cross-tenant Synchronization feature enabled
Provisioned users from home to target tenants
Users are provisioned as UserType = member
Use Cases
Multitenant organization people search is supported across a range of scenarios and Microsoft 365 applications. Some of the scenarios you can test and validate are described below:
Microsoft Outlook (OWA, desktop and mobile app)
Nestor (nestor@contoso.com) searches for "Megan" on the centralized search bar in OWA and gets the results and can view Megan's people card with limited profile information.
Nestor types in "Megan" in the To line of the email and can send an email to Megan after getting the results for megan@fabrikam.com.
Nestor @mentions "Megan" in the body of the email and can get the result for megan@fabrikam.com.
Nestor types in "Megan" in the cc line of the email and can get the result for megan@fabrikam.com.
Nestor can hover and/or click on Megan's profile picture/initials to view Megan's limited people card.
Home tenant: The tenant you want to search from. The direction of the search is outbound.
Resource tenant: The tenant you want to search in. The direction of the search is inbound.
A tenant can be both home and resource tenant simultaneously.
Cross-Tenant synchronization is a feature that enables multitenant organizations to grant users access to applications in other tenants within the organization. It achieves this by synchronizing internal member users from a home tenant into a resource tenant as external B2B users.
Learn about Microsoft Search including where users can search, the answers and results they'll see, and how you can tailor the search experience for your organization.
If you’re an administrator who deploys and manages Microsoft 365 and performs Microsoft 365 tenant-level implementation and administration of cloud and hybrid environments, this certification is designed for you.