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

Brass Contributor

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. 

o365-new-signin1b.png

111 Replies

I'm the first to admit I have a lousy sense of humor, but I thought of this today . . .

Microsoft's new motto should be:

"Deploy now, ask forgiveness later"

An update on the Office 2010 issue from a few hours ago, which sounds more hopeful:

 

"We’re actively investigating the issues with Office 2010. We believe we might be close to a fix and appreciate your patience.

 

Office 2010 continues to work with the existing/old UI. If your users had opted-in to the new UI, they can clear IE (not Edge) browser cookies to go back to the old UI and unblock themselves in Office 2010."

They have claimed that the exsiting company branding should work with the new sign-in page. but the original O365 branding is showing on our page. 

The new sign in page shares the same branding as the "classic" UI. Any updates you make to company branding in Azure Portal will show up in both experiences.

 

As for ADFS, we're working on a web theme that can be applied to your servers so your ADFS login looks like the new UI.

The logic for when company branding shows up in the new sign-in page should not be different from the old experience.

I'll be happy to take a look into this if you PM me the URL you're using.
Clearing IE cookies will solve the issue as long as the user doesn't click to opt-in to the new UI again on the login page. You shouldn't have to do it per document.

I had an issue in one enviroment where clearing the browser only allowed the doc to be opened. Once it closed it seemed to invoke the new Experience in the background and hence errored. Not fully investigated but may also cache in the Office 2010 application. We will just advise users not to use it.

Hi Cian,

It seems to be some times but I've had the error come up randomly now. I'm doing some testing for some guys in Microsoft as they're having trouble recreating it.

I've provided some Fiddler traces and they seem to think that's giving them some clues
Doesn't seem to be per document but I have seen the following.

1. Had the error after pressing the link.
2. Cleared cookies
3. Worked fine.
4. Error randomly came back on another document.

I'm pleased Microsoft is trying to work this out with you, hopefully, the traces will reveal something.

 

So the problem is reoccurring randomly, even when reverting to the old sign-in experience after clearing cookies?

 

There seem to be more customers out there with Office 2010 connecting to Office 365 than I would have thought! I can see from Microsoft's point of view, why they are changing support for just subscription clients or Office perpetual clients within mainstream support, in a few years, to simplify these sorts of support issues.

 

Yeah, I've seen it a couple of times so it seems as though even though cookies are removed it still tries to default to MA.

 

I was talking to my manager about this very thing. I think MS has kind of handled this badly but at the end of the day, Office 2010 is 7-year-old software. In the future, this won't matter because theoretically, anyone with an O365 License will be running the updated desktop software. 

 

that said the main thing holding us back is the workstation refresh which I would say is a challenge for most of, if not at least a lot of large environments 

Definitely a challenge.... or a good argument for running virtual desktops on those older workstations.

@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:  

 

New sign-in experience for Office 365 and other Microsoft services.png

Funny enough it is our old Virtual desktops (appV) that will be hit most with the 2010 issue. Its on its way out so should not be a disaster.

Thanks for calling this out @Vasil Michev (and for the double ping as I was on Vacation). This is indeed much valuable feedback, and I`m pretty sure @Brjann Brekkan@Nasos Kladakis, and @Alex Simons (AZURE) will want to learn about the user experience for the new Azure AD Sign In.

Are the folks that are having difficulties with Office 2010 desktop apps using ADFS?

 

I'm asking because I'm curious if the forced Modern Authentication issue being discussed with 2010 desktop apps is also occuring if the environment uses ADFS.

We are not using ADFS. We are using Okta for SSO.

Going me see if.

Hi, I'm a Program Manager on the Identity Services team that owns the new Azure AD login UI. We're still investigating the issue with Office 2010 and think we might be close to a fix. 

 

I would like to make a quick clarification: the new experience is solely a UI update with no changes in protocol. As such, there's no change to how authentication is done in the 2010 client apps - there's no change to how modern auth is used.

Thank you Kelvin.

 

Just to be clear:

I know that modern auth has never been supported in Office 2010 and my client should be aware of that too. So, as long as the limited functionality it has with Office 365 more or less remains the same, their expectations should also be met.

 

It seems that Microsoft is trying to just keep enabling Office 2010 to fall back to older auth methods like it has in the past. If so, that is great.