GAL Federation between different O365 tenants
As organisations grow, or have to separate different business areas in different O365 tenants it would be useful to be able to share or federate global address lists between different tenants. The only current choices are:
Create contact objects in tenants which are then disconnected from the original user - this means if the user details change the contact in the other tenant becomes out of sync.
Where domain federation in in place and directory synchronisation services running for each tenant, create on premise AD users as mail enabled users and ensure each directory sync for each tenant looks at the other domains. This will ensure that user objects are sync'd to the other tenant as mail contacts.
The second method works quite well from a point of ensuring that user details are always accurate with AD objects but only works in an environment where domain federation and dirsync are used. This is not an option in a completely cloud based environment.
Allowing GAL federation/sync between tenants would reduce on premise administrative burden and also provide a solution for cloud only adoption.

71 comments
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Udomsuke commented
We have may enterprise customers, they have branches in each region around the world. But prefectly make O365 is a good tool of collaboration. We need Federation GAL sync, the third party software can work, but why we need it, our collaboration is on O365.
@Microsoft please consider
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Ryan commented
We need this feature because management multi-tenants commutation is nightmare. Waste too much effort of end-users to contact others.
Ryan.
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Charbel commented
Please allow tenants that participate in an organization relationship the ability to see room mailboxes across tenants when booking meetings. Having to type in an email address for a room mailbox, or creating a contact as a workaround in one of the tenants is not a great user experience. Users should be able to select 'Location' and see the room mailboxes available to them from the other tenant.
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Anonymous commented
This would be great. Our organisation has migrated some users into a separate tenant but people still need to contact each other.
GAL federation would solve a lot of problems. -
Mohan commented
please add this feature
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Anonymous commented
Please add this as a feature - Tenant to Tenant collaboration for GAL would be wonderful
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Scott commented
I added an address book using www.office.com and it worked. Unfortunately we see ldap errors randomly. To clarify, I also have an account with the other tenant added in outlook
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365Admin commented
Our company is divided into different groups of companies and hence separate tenants are created for separate companies. People are using MS team and need to interact with users of other companies frequently and want to be able to search the users in other companies just like internal users (by typing few words of their name instead of whole email address). So this feature is very much important. Please add this feature asap.
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Yassein Subratty commented
We have many of our customers who needs to share the GAL between multiple tenants but unfortunately this particular feature is not available natively in Office 365. Now we need to evaluate third party applications to be able achieve same.
@Microsoft - Please add this feature.
Thanks
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Juan Zúñiga commented
Currenyly in our company we have two Office 365 domains and we are implementing Microsoft Teams, but the problem is that as we have different domains we cannot see the full contact list. It would be very helpful if we could join the contact list of one or more domains.
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Wiebe Niehof commented
We build a solution that not only allows GAL Federations between different Office365 Tenants, but even to companies that use Google GSuite contacts, Okta, OneLogin etc customers.
Completely pre-integrated with your current GAL. It automatically syncs between all those sources.
Check it out: https://www.federated.directory
Also in Microsoft AppSource:
https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/web-apps/fed_blokes.federated_directoryAnd Microsoft Azure AD Marketplace:
https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/aad.federateddirectory -
Keren commented
This solution solves the issue, worked for me!
https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/pro-vision.dayone?tab=Overview -
Anonymous commented
I would have thought this feature would have been added years ago.
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Martijn Jonker commented
Since there's no tenant to tenant migration (yet?) this would surely reduce the annoyance my users have while collaborating in the two-tenant-setup in our company. Definitely of value to us, can't wait!
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Sidney Wong commented
Yes please.
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Hisham commented
Urgent need
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Jordan commented
This is truly a major need that needs to be addressed. We own a portfolio of companies that are distinct so we need to keep their tenants separate, but we want to roll their GALs up to the Corporate level for better communication and scheduling meetings .I use a third party solution to do this now and I do not even want to mention it because it is that horrible to work with.
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Andrey commented
It`s very important case!
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Anonymous commented
Please look into this. Office365 is all about collaboration so this would be such a useful feature.
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John Doe commented
Why is this not a feature? There would be many organisations that this would apply where a 'parent' organisation purchases another organisation, the only other options are 3rd party paid options that can be quite costly.