Self-service sign-up

Applies to: Green circle with a white check mark symbol. Workforce tenants Green circle with a white check mark symbol. External tenants (learn more)

Self-service sign-up is an essential feature for your External ID workforce and customer scenarios. It gives your partners, consumers, and other external users a frictionless way to sign up and get access to your apps without any intervention on your part.

In either scenario, you can create a personalized sign-up experience by customizing the look and feel, providing sign-in with social identity providers, and collecting information about the user during the sign-up process.

Note

You can associate user flows with apps built by your organization. User flows can't be used for Microsoft apps, like SharePoint or Teams.

User flow for self-service sign-up

A self-service sign-up user flow creates a sign-up experience for the application you're providing to external users. You can configure user flow settings to control how the user signs up for the application:

  • Account types used for sign-in, such as social accounts like Facebook, or Microsoft Entra accounts
  • Attributes to be collected from the user signing up, such as first name, postal code, or country/region of residency

The user can sign in to your application, via the web, mobile, desktop, or single-page application (SPA). The application initiates an authorization request to the user flow-provided endpoint. The user flow defines and controls the user's experience. When the user completes the sign-up user flow, Microsoft Entra ID generates a token and redirects the user back to your application. Upon completion of sign-up, an account is provisioned for the user in the directory. Multiple applications can use the same user flow.

Example of self-service sign-up

The following B2B collaboration example illustrates self-service sign-up capabilities for guest users. A partner of Woodgrove opens the Woodgrove app. They decide they want to sign up for a supplier account, so they select Request your supplier account, which initiates the self-service sign-up flow.

Example of self-service sign-up starting page

They use the email of their choice to sign up.

Example showing selection of Facebook for sign-in

Microsoft Entra ID creates a relationship with Woodgrove using the partner's Facebook account, and creates a new guest account for the user after they sign up.

Woodgrove wants to know more about the user, like name, business name, business registration code, phone number.

Example showing user sign-up attributes

The user enters the information, continues the sign-up flow, and gets access to the resources they need.

Example showing the user signed in

Next steps

User flows for B2B collaboration:

User flows for customer identity and access management (CIAM):