I've recently gone through a series of acquisitions where we brought in three companies, each with their own Entra tenants. The legal requirements mean we can't merge these tenants until at least a year from now, leaving us stuck with four separate Entra instances. This situation is creating a crazy amount of headaches for everyone involved.
Sales teams work across all four entities, but with each tenant having different licensing, policies, and even password requirements, everything feels fragmented. For instance, someone from Tenant A struggles to access Teams files in Tenant B without creating a guest account, which complicates their identity management further.
B2B collaboration has its own challenges too; guest accounts are messy, and shared folders require manual permissions. If we need to adjust any policies, it's a four-step process, adding to the chaos. I'm looking for advice on how to improve cross-company collaboration when all these identities are siloed. Has anyone navigated this issue successfully?
5 Answers
If merging isn't an option right now, consider exploring multi-tenant organizations. It won't fix everything, but it might help streamline operations a bit. Check out the official Microsoft docs for more insights on setting this up.
One approach could be to copy all users into a main tenant while keeping the others active. Even if you can't delete them yet, working from one central tenant might ease a lot of collaboration issues. You don't need to completely merge but allow primary operations to happen from one place.
That's a solid idea, but I think they have to keep them separate due to the legal terms.
You might also want to look into cross-tenant sync. It could help users with accessing resources across different tenants, although it won't solve every problem you're facing.
Don't overlook the External Collaboration Settings and Cross Tenant Access Policies. Consolidating collaborative workspaces like Teams Shared Channels can really help. Plus, using tools like Microsoft365DSC can simplify management across your tenants. They've even got a new Tenant Configuration Management API that looks promising for this situation.
Using Multi-Tenant Organizations (MTO) could be worth exploring. It allows syncing users across all tenants as guests, enabling access to shared resources like SharePoints and calendars, which would enhance collaboration just a bit. Just keep in mind there are some limitations when it comes to search functions and organizing group meetings.
I've implemented this with 12 tenants. Setting a configuration baseline for sharing across all tenants made the user experience way smoother.