Can You Migrate SharePoint FBA SQL External User Accounts and Passwords to Office 365?

(Update as of August 2018:  This article is still accurate.  However, a new option for migrating on-premises FBA\SQL external user accounts is now available - ExCM Extranet Online.  Businesses with significant investments in on-premises SharePoint extranets now have the option  to use Office 365 for Intranet purposes and ExCM Extranet Online for extranet purposes.  ExCM Extranet Online supports seamless migration of SharePoint on-premises external user accounts and content.)

The short answer is: there is no way to do this and likely never will be.  Read on if you are interested in more details.

Background on SharePoint FBA and SQL External User Accounts

Using SharePoint’s forms-based authentication feature along with the SQL Membership Provider feature has been a very popular way to use SharePoint as an extranet platform for many years.  In many cases, after a company got their Intranet up and running on SharePoint, the next logical step was to provision a new Web Application for use as an extranet for collaborating with customers, vendors, etc.

Should a Business Extranet Application Run on a Cloud Service?

Because we make an extranet-enabling add-in for on-premise SharePoint, we are getting this question more and more.  People are wanting to know why they should even consider running their extranet applications on-premise any more when “everything is moving to the Cloud”?

(Aside: our definition of a business extranet application is an application that is designed for secure and private collaboration between a business and a business partner such as a customer, vendor etc.  On-premise SharePoint has long been an excellent and popular platform for this type of application when securely published to the Internet using Forms-based Authentication.)