Self Service Sign Up (B2B User Flows) Unboxing!

I talked about B2B collaboration in an earlier post.

At time of writing, there are a few ways to get users from external directories (or no directory) into your tenant to collaborate:

As you can see from the graphic above, there are a couple of ways for external users themselves to initiate their provisioning into your tenant - Access Packages and Self Service User Flows.

Today we are "unboxing" the self service user flows experience.

First I headed over to Azure Active Directory in the Azure Portal, and clicked "External Identities".  As you can see, the left hand menu has a section entitled "Self Service sign up" - let's explore this:
  • Custom user attributes - these define the attributes you are going to collect from the user on sign-up.  I added one called "Favourite Sci Fi Show" as you can see in the above screenshot.
  • All API Connectors - this allows you to register external APIs (you must develop these yourself)
  • User flows - you will need at least one user flow to create an interface for external users to experience.


Once you have selected the flow type (at time of writing there is only one), the next screen allows you to configure your flow:


Once you have created the user flow, you can manage all of its properties, including for example page layout.

To test the flow, you need to assign it to an application.  The documentation for this is here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/external-identities/self-service-sign-up-user-flow but essentially you need to:
  • add the application within the user flow edit screens
  • enable self-service sign up at the tenant level in Azure AD
  • invoke the flow from your application.

Overall, the self service sign up feature of Azure Active Directory is a valuable addition to the platform and greatly improves the user experience for both administrators and end users.


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