External Collaboration
Guest access, B2B direct connect, and Shared Channels — configured, governed, and secure. Partners collaborate in your tenant. Your data stays under your control.
Your Data Is Already Leaving — Just Through the Wrong Channels
Every mid-market company collaborates with external partners. Agencies, customers, auditors, resellers, freelancers. Without a sanctioned external collaboration model, employees improvise: forwarded emails, WhatsApp groups, personal Dropbox, files attached to consumer Gmail accounts. The data leaves the tenant before IT even knows there is a project.
This is not a failure of your IT team. Microsoft Entra External ID gives you two ways to bring a partner in — Guest Access (B2B collaboration) and B2B Direct Connect (Shared Channels) — both governed through cross-tenant access settings, alongside Teams external access for chat and meetings. Every one of them ships with a default that favors convenience over control. Configured together and governed correctly, they close the shadow-IT problem. Switched on without a plan, they create new risk.
Traditional consulting for external collaboration? Two months, five figures, a consultant who configures the switches and leaves. Your team ends up with settings they did not design and governance they cannot explain to auditors.
ACTIVITIES IN DETAIL
DELIVERABLES
Current State: Every guest account, sharing setting, and cross-tenant policy as your rollback baseline
Partner Categories: Strategic, project, vendor, and ad-hoc with access scope and lifecycle rule
Decision Matrix: Guest access against B2B Direct Connect, external chat, and sharing links
Cross-Tenant Access: Default and partner-specific inbound and outbound policy, MFA and device trust
Sharing Controls: Invitation rights down to named admin roles, plus the domain allow or block list
B2B Direct Connect: Shared Channels validated end to end with a real external user
Sensitivity Labels: External sharing, guest access, and encryption behaviour per published label
Conditional Access: MFA, 8-hour sign-in frequency, and app-enforced restrictions for guests
Guest Lifecycle: Review cadence, stale-account cleanup, and the partner onboarding runbook
Next steps after External Collaboration
A cleanly configured tenant is the foundation. These blueprints build directly on it
