Today users in our tenant began getting prompted to try a new sign-in experience for Office 365. It looks a little different, but I'm unable to find documentation about what exactly has changed, and why? I just want to be able to answer the inevitible questions that come up. Some of our users have already checked to see if they were getting phished.

It is suddenly, as no advance notice was given to either users or admins. And it kinda contradicts what Alex said after the unfortunate branding incident: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2017/04/25/having-a-growth-mindset-learning-from-our-customers-were-reverting-the-branding-logic-on-azure-ad-login-pages/ To quote: Additionally, we learned that we took many you by surprise and did not give you enough time to alert and train your employees about the change....We’re going to revisit the overall here plan and take steps to better socialize and communicate future end-user facing UX changes.

This change has arrived on our tenant too. Very frustrating to have no forewarning as we have told our users to be suspicious of phishing attacks, then suddenly the login experience looks completely different. I really wish Microsoft would think about the cost to their customers when they roll out changes like this without any warning.

Victor_Ungureanu wrote:The user is told that a new login experience is availabe and is given the posibility to try it.And therein lies the problem. Microsoft has so many channels available to communicate these changes to customers (i.e. tenant admins) via the Office 365 roadmap, Office blog, Message Center, and even arguably here on the MS Tech Community (though it will not be as easily discovered here). Heck you could do a Microsoft Mechanics video explaining the benefits of the new design. Instead a change is thrown in front of end users with no notification at all, and no controls for tenant admins. Again. The change itself is fine. Harmless even. New sign-in experience? Great. Two thumbs up. But the feedback is the same, every single time - communicate changes in advance, please.

Cian Allner wrote:Here is the announcement - The new Azure AD Signin Experience is now in Public Preview:The wrong place for such announcements, and came after the feature started showing up in tenants :-/"We know that this will be a disruptive change for some of you...."And yet here we are. Frustrating.

I absolutely agree Paul. See my earlier comment for context. I don't get why lessons haven't been learnt. Incidents like this set us all back and our confidence in how this is meant to work. The fact this hasn't reached the Message center yet I find somewhat egregious. How many customers are going discover this only when they get reports from their users or after it's mandatory otherwise? This didn't have to be a disruptive change at all, if there was enough time given to prepare customers for this new experience. Incidentally, it's strange the announcement points to the old, read-only Azure AD forum, minor point I know. I thought there was meant to be an internal customer advocate role in the change management process. They would stand up for customers as these changes are going through and intervene when required!

New sign-in experience for Office 365, what's it about?

111 Replies

John Guy
Brass Contributor
Aug 01, 2017
I have also noted this change and have had no announcment in the message center.
Also documentation available and customisable areas available with branding.
- Cian Allner
  Silver Contributor
  Aug 06, 2017
  John Guy wrote:
  I have also noted this change and have had no announcment in the message center.
  Also documentation available and customisable areas available with branding.
  It's appeared in the message center as of yesterday - New sign-in experience for Office 365 and other Microsoft services:
C_the_S
Bronze Contributor
Aug 01, 2017
Yet another unannouced change! Thanks!
I'm looking in my Tenant's Message center and I don't see anything. Fortunately we use a non-Microsoft single sign on service and most of my users won't see this change.
- Sean Stockburger
  Brass Contributor
  Aug 01, 2017
  I checked our message center again to see if I missed something. I'm not finding it, but I did confirm that it is visible to multiple license types in our tenant, and it is not tied to being enabled for MFA. Appears to be a tenant-wide change.
  
  The good news is that the new sign-in puts our branding/service desk contact info in a more visible location. Other than that the differences are subtle enough that I doubt most people will notice any change. However they are being told the experience is "new" so we are likely to get a few questions from folks about what exactly is new?
  
  Sean
- VasilMichev
  MVP
  Aug 01, 2017
  Well, let's see if Tom Batcheler can shed some light on this?
Sean Stockburger
Brass Contributor
Aug 01, 2017
Thank you both for the responses. We are an EDU tenant if that makes a difference. If anything we tend to get some features later than others, even set to first-release. It might just be that we are finally catching up to a change that hit other tenants months ago.

One change this week is that our Azure/o365 admin applied new licenses to everyone. I wonder if that triggered something? Even before that we saw some pretty significant changes in some screens, especially the window that appears after you click to share a file or folder with someone.

I don't think it is anything local to my computer, because it is affecting multiple users. So far those of us who have noticed are set up for Multifactor Autentication. I will check with some of our users who are not yet enabled for MFA.

Sean
VasilMichev
MVP
Aug 01, 2017
Perhaps this one? https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2017/04/07/improving-the-branding-logic-of-azure-ad-login-pages/

Although they reverted the behavior shortly after the announcement. Maybe this is the next iteration...
jcgonzalezmartin
MVP
Aug 01, 2017
I have checked this in two First Release tenants and I'm not seeing this notification...are you sure it's not coming from a plugin you have installed in your PC?

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New sign-in experience for Office 365, what's it about?

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