On April 12^th, Azure announced the General Availability of Azure AD B2B Collaboration. In a nutshell, it allows you to easily invite guests into your Azure Active Directory (AAD). As a Visual Studio Team Services customer, this enables you to invite guests into your AAD backed VSTS accounts in two steps:

Step 1: In the Azure portal, navigate to “All users” under your Active Directory. Click on the new button called “+ New guest user”.

From this screen, you can now invite any email address into your Azure AD. In this example, we are inviting a contractor, rob@contoso.com (Rob will get an email invitation from Azure AD delivered to rob@contoso.com that he has to accept).

Step 2: The invited guest is immediately added to the Azure AD, which means you can invite Rob to your VSTS account without waiting for him to accept the invitation.

At this point as the VSTS admin you are able to grant Rob project access by adding him to various VSTS groups, as well as assign him extensions. As soon as Rob accepts the invitation he will be able to login like any other member of the directory.

Future Plans

Visual Studio Team Services are currently working on tighter integration with Azure AD. In the future, we will allow you to invite new AAD guests in one simple step from within your VSTS account, without needing to visit the Azure portal. We will also make the invitation email optional, so that an invited guest can attempt to login to VSTS without having seen the invitation email and still be successful.