Get A Single License And Manage Multiple Tenants
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.
Customer Use Cases Of The Multiple-Tenant Environment
“Multi-tenant organization” (MTO) is how Microsoft calls this feature. It has two use cases:
- An organization that owns and operates more than one tenant.
- System admins that need a separate admin account.
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.
What Are The License and Use Rights?
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:
- Find people across organizations easily: The multi-tenant organization (MTO) People Search is a collaboration feature that enables the search and discovery of people across multiple tenants.
- Streamlined workforce collaboration: Users can now join a meeting, chat, call, or collaborate in a channel hosted in another tenant, and simultaneously compose chat messages in their own tenant. Users can receive cross-tenant notifications for all accounts and tenants added to the Teams client, no matter which one is currently in focus.
- Unlock new ways for employees and leaders to connect: Communities, Campaigns, AMAs, & Events can include employees from other tenants to view content, post, reply, join and participate within that community and or Ask me Anything.
- Manage incidents across tenants: With multi-tenant management in Microsoft Defender XDR, security operations teams can quickly investigate incidents and perform advanced hunting across data from multiple tenants, removing the need for administrators to log in and out of each individual tenant.
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.
- Microsoft Entra ID Governance licensing clarifications
- Collaborate across M365 tenants with Entra ID multi-tenant organization
- Multi-tenant organization capabilities are now available in Microsoft 365
How To Implement Microsoft Entra External 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.
Get A Multi-Tenant Environment Today!
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.
