50+ SaaS Apps and growing now support federation with Azure AD!

[Alex Simons (AZURE)]

First published on CloudBlogs on Sep, 02 2014
Howdy folks, As many of you know, our gallery of pre-integrated SaaS applications grows pretty much every week and we now support over 2300 total apps! What you might not know is that we've been hard at work increasing the number of applications that integrate with Azure AD using SAML federation. Today I'm happy to be able to announce that Azure AD now provides integrated SAML support for over 50 applications , including all of the apps pictured below. Since we first released Azure AD, we've receive a lot of feedback from customers about the importance of supporting SAML-based authentication for applications. This federated SAML experience is the current gold standard in the industry. It enables both a more secure system and a more streamlined user experience for app single sign-on. So if you have been waiting, today might be your lucky day.

Pictured: SAML-based apps appearing in the Azure AD access panel

The list of apps that currently support supported SAML integration with Azure AD today (9/3/2014) includes 15Five, Adobe EchoSign, AnswerHub, ArcGIS, Ariett Purchase & Expense, Ariett Touch, BambooHR, Bime, Blue Jeans, Box, Canvas LMS, Citrix GoToMeeting, Citrix ShareFile, CloudBees, Concur, Dream Broker, Dropbox for Business, Egnyte, Gigya, Google Apps, Greenhouse , Intacct, ITRP, Jive, Kintone, Kudos, LogicMonitor, MyDay, New Relic, PagerDuty, Panorama9, Rally Software, RunMyProcess, Salesforce, Salesforce Sandbox, Samanage, ScreenSteps, ServiceNow, ShiftPlanning, SpringCM, SumoLogic, SumTotal Central, Syncplicity, TeamSeer, Thoughtworks Mingle, ThousandEyes, UserVoice, Wikispaces, Workday, Zendesk, Zoho Mail, and Zscaler. This list is continually growing and we'll be adding more SAML federated apps every week. We're thrilled to be working with these partners and I'd like to thank them for their interest and investment in Azure AD. We're really excited to have the opportunity to partner with them for the benefit of our mutual customers. In addition to all these new apps we are also now providing support for service provider (SP) initiated authentication , which allows users to do things like visit an app's web site to sign in directly, or sign in using downloadable client apps. We support service-provider initiated authentication for all of the pre-integrated SAML-based apps that support it in our gallery. This includes the recently integrated apps, as well as existing integrations like Salesforce, Dropbox for Business, Google Apps, ServiceNow, and Box. To get started, visit the Azure AD App Gallery and select the application you want to integrate with your directory. Click the "Connect" button to be guided through the simple process of signing into the Azure management portal and integrate your application. If you have already integrated your application with Azure AD using password-based SSO, you can edit the configuration to use SAML federated authentication instead.

Pictured: Configuring SAML-based authentication for an app in the Azure management portal

If you would like Azure AD to support authentication with an app that isn't listed, you can request new app integrations on the Azure AD feedback forum . As always, we'd love to receive any feedback or suggestions you have. Best regards, Alex Simons (Twitter: Alex_A_Simons ) Director of Program Management Active Directory Team