Introduction
Once an app is created by the App Maker, he can share it with the organization’s users so that they can start using it. We can add them as an App User or as a Co-Owner.
However, sometimes, we would like to share the app with people outside the organization like Vendors, Contractors, etc: who would like to interact with the app and collaborate on cross-organization activities.
In this article, we will see how to share the App with users outside an organization.
Enable Azure B2B Collaboration
Before we can add guest users, we need to ensure the external collaboration settings allow inviting guests. Header over to External Identities -> External Collaboration Settings and ensure that the Guest Invite Settings are set to one of the highlighted 3 settings, based on the Company policy, you may have to choose the most restrictive/inclusive option.
Add External User as a Guest
The first step in sharing the Power App externally is to add the specific user as a Guest to the organization’s Active Directory. To do this lets head over Portal.Azure.com ->Users and Select New guest user
Fill in the details and click on Invite which will send an invitation to the email address mentioned in the form.
The user will get also get an invitation which he can accept.
The user account will be created as a guest user in the AD
Thus, we have added the external user as a guest to organizational AD.
License Assignment
Depending on the Power Apps implementation and whether there are premium connectors being used or SharePoint/Dataverse is being used as the backend, we will have to assign a license to the guest user so that he can start interacting with the Power App that is going to be shared with him. A simple license guide for the guest user based on the access he needs is described as:
Plan | Customized SharePoint list form (using non-premium connectors) | Customized SharePoint list form (using premium connectors) | Canvas app (using non-premium connectors) | Canvas app (using premium connectors) | Model-driven app |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
No license | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
SharePoint user (without Power Apps license) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
Power Apps included with Office | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
Power Apps per-app plan | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Power Apps per user plan | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Share the Power App with External User
Once the license assignment considerations have been taken into account, we can go to the specific app ->Share and type in the guest’s name and click on Share. As we can see, at this point, guests cannot be added as co-owners to the app.
This will send out an invite to the guest user for accessing the Power App
On clicking on Open the app, it will open the Power App
We can also share the web link of the app that we get from the details page, directly with the guest user so that he can access it on the fly.
Summary
Thus, we saw how to share an already created Power App with an external user who did not previously exist in the AD, by adding him as a guest user to the organizational AD.
