Parnter Sharing with Office 365 and Azure AD B2B

Background
With Office 365 and SharePoint Online, a common question is how can I external sharing with Partners. 

In SharePoint Online, the concept of External Sharing has been around for a while.  You have the ability to identify users you want to share with and administrative capabilities to manage external users.

One challenge people have is doing B2B sharing with SharePoint Online.  SharePoint Online external sharing does have PowerShell, so you can do some automation external sharing, however sometimes you just need a better approach.

Azure AD B2B Collaboration
Another approach to do external sharing with partner organizations is with a feature called Azure AD B2B.

With this capability you can:

• Organizations no longer have to managed a separate directory for external users nor have to go through the complexity of setting up federated auth on a per partner basis.
• Allows partner/external users to use their own credentials to access data you are sharing getting you out of the password management business.
• Removes partner/external user access with the user leaves their organization.  If the partner organization is turning off the accounts when the person leaves, you are assured their access to your data and applications is also being removed.
• Capability allows you to perform bulk invites of partner organizations.
• Partner users are invited and confirmed through an email notification process.
• If the partner organizations do not have Azure AD, no problem.  The partner users will complete the invitation process and have a free Azure AD account created for them that they will use to access shared data and applications.
• Set-up external sharing with partner organizations that goes beyond just Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

References
Azure B2B Collaboration - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-b2b-collaboration-overview/

Azure B2B Video - https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Azure-AD-Identity/AzureADB2B

Learn all about the Azure AD B2B Collaboration Preview - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2015/09/15/learn-all-about-the-azure-ad-b2b-collaboration-preview/

Manage external sharing for your SharePoint Online environment - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-external-sharing-for-your-SharePoint-Online-environment-C8A462EB-0723-4B0B-8D0A-70FEAFE4BE85