Lab 05: Add guest users to the directory

Lab scenario

Your company works with many vendors and, on occasion, you need to add some vendor accounts to your directory as a guest.

Estimated time: 20 minutes

Exercise 1 - Add guest users to the directory

Task - Add the guest user

  1. Sign in to the https://portal.azure.com as a user who is assigned a limited administrator directory role or the Guest Inviter role.

  2. Select Azure Active Directory.

  3. Under Manage, select Users.

  4. Select + New user.

  5. On the New user menu, select Invite external user and then add your information as the guest user.

    NOTE - Group email addresses are not supported; enter the email address for an individual. Also, some email providers allow users to add a plus symbol (+) and additional text to their email addresses to help with things like inbox filtering. However, Azure AD does not currently support plus symbols in email addresses. To avoid delivery issues, omit the plus symbol and any characters following it up to the @ symbol.

  6. Enter an email address, such as sc300externaluser1@sc300email.com.

  7. When complete, select Invite.

  8. On the Users page, verify your account is listed and, in the User type column, verify Guest is shown.

After you send the invitation, the user account is automatically added to the directory as a guest.

Exercise 2 - Invite guest users in bulk

Task 1 - Bulk user invite

A recent partnership has been established with another company. For now, employees of the partner company will be added as guests. You need to ensure you can import multiple guest users at one time.

  1. Sign in to the https://portal.azure.com as your Global Administrator.

  2. In the navigation pane, select Azure Active Directory.

  3. Under Manage, select Users.

  4. On the Users page, on the menu, select Bulk operations > Bulk invite.

    Screen image displaying the All user page with the Bulk operations and Bulk invite menu options highlighted

  5. In the Bulk invite users pane, select Download to a sample CSV template with invitation properties.

  6. Using an editor to view the CSV file, review the template.

  7. Open the .csv template and add a line for each guest user. Required values are:

    • Email address to invite - the user who will receive an invitation
    • Redirection url - the URL to which the invited user is forwarded after accepting the invitation.

    Screen image displaying the example bulk invite guests template CSV

  8. Save the file.

  9. On the Bulk invite users page, under Upload your csv file, browse to the file.

    Note - When you select the file, validation of the .csv file starts.

  10. After the file contents are validated, you will see File uploaded successfully. If there are errors, you must fix them before you can submit the job.

    Screen image displaying Bulk invite users with File uploaded successfully message highlighted

  11. When your file passes validation, select Submit to start the Azure bulk operation that adds the invitations.

  12. To view the job status, select Select here to view the status of each operation. Or, you can select Bulk operation results in the Activity section. For details about each line item within the bulk operation, select the values under the # Success, # Failure, or Total Requests columns. If failures occurred, the reasons for failure will be listed.

    Screen image displaying the results of a bulk operation

  13. When the job completes, you will see a notification that the bulk operation succeeded.

Task 2 - Invite guest users with PowerShell

  1. Open PowerShell as an administrator. This can be done by searching for PowerShell in Windows and choosing Run as administrator.

  2. You will need to add the Azure AD PowerShell module, if you have not used it before. Run the command: Install-Module AzureAD. When prompted, select “Y” to continue.

     Install-Module AzureAD
    
  3. Confirm that the module installed correctly by running the command:

     Get-Module AzureAD 
    
  4. Next, you will need to login to Azure by running:

     Connect-AzureAD
    
  5. The Microsoft login window will appear for you to login to Azure AD.

  6. To verify that you are connected and to see existing users, run:

     Get-AzureADUser 
    
  7. You are ready to invite a guest user. The following command will be populated with the user information and run. If you have more than one user to add, you can use a notepad txt file to add the user information and copy/paste into PowerShell.

     New-AzureADMSInvitation -InvitedUserDisplayName "Display" -InvitedUserEmailAddress name@emaildomain.com -InviteRedirectURL https://myapps.microsoft.com -SendInvitationMessage $true 
    

You now know how to invite users within the Azure AD portal, Microsoft 365 Admin center, Bulk invitations with a csv file, and inviting users with PowerShell commands.