Can we create external users accounts inside our office 365, before sending them invitation to access the site collections

Question

I am working on an Office 365 sharepoint online, and for sharing certain site collections i want to set this option:-

But for some external users, they do not exists inside our office 365 users. so my question is can we create external users inside our office 365 users' list, so we can enable external sharing for our sharepoint sites, but at the same time to mention that we can only share with existing external users?? I know that external users accounts will be created automatically for us if we share a site with an external user, and the user try to access the site. but for security reasons i do not want to enable external sharing for everyone, i only want to enable external sharing for existing users..so not sure if i can create an external user account in advance inside office 365?

Answer 1

You can invite external users via Azure B2B. See What is Azure AD B2B collaboration? for information on how to add users to Azure. You can then add them as normal to SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business.