Smartsheet and Azure AD: Two great services that work great together!

First published on CloudBlogs on Jan, 16 2015
Howdy Folks, Today's blog post is a topic that I'm personally very excited about, our partnership with Smartsheet. Smartsheet is a pretty cool cloud based project management and collaboration service and they've just turned on their integration to Azure Active Directory! Our joint customers can now access the Smartsheet's service using their company-managed user accounts in Azure AD. The Azure Active Directory integration also makes the handshake between Smartsheet and the Office tools, like email and file storage, seamless. This is one of the cooler things about integrating with Azure AD – it makes integrating with Office 365 dead simple. I'm also excited because Smartsheet uses OpenID Connect to enable federated single sign-on and is one of the first SaaS apps to do so. As a result of our partnership, Azure AD and Smartsheet customers get three major benefits:

• Organizations using Azure Active Directory can now easily manage employee access to Smartsheet using one set of company credentials from any Windows, Mac or iOS device.
• Access to Smartsheet is also now available in the Azure Active Directory Marketplace which gives users the ability to quickly launch the collaboration tool and access their sheets and tools.
• IT administrators are able to make cloud apps such as Smartsheet easily accessible to their employees in the Azure AD App Panel ( http://myapps.microsoft.com ).

Smartsheet made extensive use of the Azure Active Directory Branding Guidelines to design their login screen, and they use our Azure Active Directory " User Consent " framework to make it easy for users to grant Smartsheet access to their profile information and project documents. (Smartsheet users receive an email confirmation confirming the permissions they've granted to Smartsheet). This workflow is simple for users and eliminates work for IT administrations.

Figure 1: Smartsheet Sign-In screen

Figure 2: Smartsheet User Consent Experience

Figure 3: Confirmation for User Consent

And make sure you check out the cool Smartsheet video here . If you you'd like to learn more information about Smartsheet integration with Azure Active Directory, please visit http://smartsheet.com/microsoft Best regards, Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons ) Director of Program Management Microsoft Identity and Security Services Division