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

Opened a ticket.

Also left a comment on the blog post, but it is still "awaiting moderation".

I've tested the new login and there appeared to be no SSO or PTA support. Had to type in both the username and password.

Agree with all the comments above.

The Office365 support (via the Admin Center) came back with it doesn't work because the new Azure sign-in uses "Modern Authentication" and Office 2010 doesn't support it, but Office 2013 & 2016 do. They proceeded to tell me the fix is to update to Office 2013 or 2016.

 

Someone here has reached out to me via these forums and I'll see where that goes.

I just tried with a cloud only account (my global admin) so not using single sign on, and I still get the same error message.

Not sure what PTA means??

Pass Through Auth

 


@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!

 

For the people that have mentioned issues with smart links, can you give an example of the link used? Mine seem to work fine, but perhaps I'm missing something.

Great to see we are not alone. He is my deleted comment from the blogpost on
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2017/08/02/the-new-azure-ad-signin-experience...

 

03-08-_2017_12-47-23.jpg

 

I still waiting for Premier Support to assist. I think that will be interesting.

Thanks for the link Scott.  Wow you know things have got bad when El Reg weighs in.

 

I really appreciate Alex Simons explanation, which I quoted below for convenience but I am not sure how confident I am that this won't happen again.

 

"Hey guys – Appreciate the feedback here. Things we did differently this time:

 

1.) The changes were flighted with private preview customers first.
2.) We are doing a 30+ day public preview period that allows us to get your feedback.
3.) We are running the opt in period right now

 

I apologize that the blog post announcing the changes did not go up earlier. The dev team surprised us by getting the changes up and running a few days earlier than planned and we had to scramble to get the blog post up as fast as possible. We will figure out how to make sure that doesn’t happen next time.

 

Paul, it sounds like from your tweet that you would also like us to only offer the option to opt in to you, the admin rather than to the end-users themselves. That makes sense to me – we will look into doing that going forward.

 

Again, thanks for the input here and I’m really sorry the blog post didn’t go up before the changes were pushed out."

You can customize ADFS with a custom web them to keep the experience similar. We will release a downloadable web theme by end of calendar year. Thanks! (Twitter: @MrADFS)

I too am skeptical, but we've been hearing it for years, and Microsoft continues doing the same thing over and over and over. . .

Not everyone uses ADFS, we sure don't.

And for those that do, why isn't the theme ready now for this rollout?

So apparently Smart links do still work, the issue reported under the blog post comments was due to using outdated format.

 

BTW nice to see you here @SamuelD MSFT :)

Uh so my office 2010 users cannot open word documents anymore if they use the new sign in page. “The operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.” Untested changes like this seriously make me think we need to stay on premise.

we have the same issue if you clear IE cookies it works.

 

agree this is frustrating but for us, the push to Office 2016 is more pressing, not sure this would make us turn away from the cloud. 

How long does clearing the cookies work for until it happens again out of interest? It's not a one time fix is it?

No that's the bad news. Seems like you need to do it per document. 

That's not good is it. On the comments it mentions this is being investigated, so hopefully a fix can be delivered even though Office 2010 is in extended support.