Changes to authentication requirements for the Office 365 home page

[Tom Batcheler]

Hi All, we're making some changes to the authentication flow for the Office 365 home page.

Beginning August 9, accessing the authenticated Office 365 home page (either through https://portal.office.com or https://www.office.com) will require that your users satisfy the Azure Active Directory Premium Conditional Access policies that you have applied to either Exchange Online or SharePoint Online.

After this change, users who do not satisfy your policies will be unable to authenticate to the Office 365 home page. Other web links on the portal.office.com domain, but with a different URL path, will be unaffected.

If you have users who don’t satisfy these policies but still need to install the desktop Office apps from the home page, they will need to install the Office apps directly from http://aka.ms/office-install.

Otherwise, no immediate action is required. For more information visit Office 365 Support. 

+ @David Annesley-DeWinter

[#2]

What if the organization does not subscribe to Azure Active Directory Premium? I assume they are unaffected?

[#3]

Hi Chris - you're absolutely correct. No impact at all for users who don't have AAD Premium or haven't set up Conditional Access policies.

[#4]

My organization does not subscribe to Azure AD Premium and we've never set up conditional access policies, but we received an alert in the Message Center that says, "Our records indicate that you have Conditional Access Policies applied to either Exchange Online or SharePoint Online for your organization."

Is the alert mistaken or is there something else we should be checking?

We have been evaluating Azure MFA Premium standalone, but I'm not sure that's related.

[#5]

Hi Andrew,

Can you email me your tenant ID and we'll have a look at why you received the message (tomb@microsoft.com)

Thanks!