Does your organization often struggle with managing multiple tenants in a multi-tenant environment? Are you tired of purchasing separate licenses for each tenant, resulting in complex and expensive licensing structures?
Look no further! With one single license, you can now easily manage and license multiple tenants within your organization’s multi-tenant environment.
In April 2024, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Entra External ID and Microsoft Entra ID multi-tenant collaboration, enabling organizations to manage multiple tenants with a single license per person.
This new capability simplifies the way businesses operate across multiple environments. It incorporates tools like Microsoft 365 People Search, Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, and Microsoft Defender XDR, all of which can be managed via the Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Entra admin centers.
“Multi-tenant organization” (MTO) is how Microsoft calls this feature. It has two use cases:
With a multi-tenant organization, organizations can have one license per person and multiple accounts in one tenant or across multiple tenants when that company is part of the same organization.
Use Case 1: An organization acquires another company and wants to interact, chat, share content, and contacts with each other.
Use Case 2: Eric works for the holding company and wants to access different SAP systems from their subsidiary company and is authenticating through Microsoft MFA with Conditional Access policies.
Use Case 3: A global admin has two accounts: one for productivity/private use and another for global admin tasks.
The license and use rights are limited to Entra ID P1, P2 and Governance. However, it’s a bit more complicated than that since Microsoft also added some Multi-Tenant Teams and Viva rights to Entra ID.
With the Multi-Tenant features, organizations and people can do the following:
Product Terms: Unfortunately, this right is not officially included in Microsoft’s Product Terms, but Microsoft does mention it in their blog posts.
Please feel free to read each one for more detailed information about the Multi-Tenant Teams and Viva rights to Entra ID.
Get started with Entra ID multi-tenant organizations:
Step 1: Form a multi-tenant organization. This Is facilitated by an invite-and-accept between two companies. (Admin Center -> Organization Settings -> Multitenant collaboration)
Step 2: Provision external member users at scale. Cross-tenant synchronization could be accomplished by Entra Admin Center or M365 Admin Center.
Step 3: Complete the prerequisites and requirements, such as the new Teams client.
Don’t let your organization’s collaboration be limited by tenant boundaries.
If you need help optimizing your multi-tenant environment or Microsoft licensing, contact the 2Data team. We’ll ensure you’re maximizing your subscription while only paying for what you need.
2Data is an independent software licensing advisory specializing in Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and IBM optimization. We help companies reduce contract costs, manage risk, and simplify their software licensing.
