Does Microsoft Support 3rd Party SSO or Not?

[Cary Siemers]

We had an issue with the OWA app for Android this morning and contacted support.

After several hours of going back and forth with the tech and their manager they said that some tests were run on the backend and somehow our SSO service setup (Okta) is what is causing the issue with the OWA app not working and would not assist me further despite the fact that an Office365 only account received the same error (that account doesn't use Okta).

Microsoft's websites say that you support 3rd party SSO services to be used with the Office365. Is that true or not?

I have since found that it was a bad Android WebService update that actually caused the issue and it was completely inexcusable in my opininion to just simply brush off the issues we were having because we use Okta when it was shown that it had nothing to do with Okta.

[#2]

Hi Cary, I'm sorry for the frustrating experience! We do support Okta and other third party claims integration; however, this does not mean that we troubleshoot third party products. "Support" is used in a few different ways, which can be very confusing. In this case, it means that the product is enabled to integrate. Ultimately, Microsoft products are compatible with a tremendous number of other solutions, and we often need to collaborate with those third parties to ensure everything works smoothly. Oftentimes, the support team will ask you to engage the third party.

However, in the example you shared, it sounds like this was handled poorly. The support engineer should have asked you to reproduce the issue without using Okta. Based on what you described, it should have been easy to recognize that it was not an Okta-related issue.

My personal opinion is that your case was inadequately addressed.

[#3]

Yes, I did that when they tried to palm me off on Okta. I fired up my cloud only admin account and reproduced the steps to no avail. The Manager's response was that when we setup SSO with Okta it probably changed cloud only accounts as well! ARGH!

The original tech closed the case without sending me any information on this supposed "misconfiguration" of SSO in the tenant so I'm still at a loss at what that is all about since we've never noticed any issues with SSO.

I've reopened the case and await the call back of yet another tech.

Thanks for listening.

[#4]

The onus of proof and a positive experience is really on Microsoft, but here are a few things that might help avoid false resolution:

Open an Okta support case and have the support engineers call you at the same time.
Create a trial Enterprise tenant and reproduce the issue in an environment without Okta.

(I am now a member of the Office product marketing org, and I spent the prior 6 years as a Technical Account Manager supporting Office 365...)