On April 18th, ITS will enable an authentication method called Seamless single sign-on which enables users to sign in with their Active directory credentials across multiple apps including Office applications, Teams , Edge and Onedrive. Users are no longer required to enter their email address and passwords repeatedly to sign in across these services.
Existing profiles will not notice this change since these clients have already been configured with a username and password during the initial configuration. New profiles, however, will automatically sign in to these clients without entering the email address and password for each service repeatedly.
\uD83D\uDCD8 Behavioral comparisons for services with and without SSO
During a first time profile login, below are some of the service experiences:
Onedrive: Without SSO, the Onedrive client currently opens in the background, prompting for an initial sign in. The user can input their email address and password after which syncing files will begin.
However, with Seamless SSO, Onedrive client opens in the background and silently signs in to begin syncing files in the following order:
Updating Onedrive
Sign in screen
Onedrive after Seamless SSO
Outlook: Without SSO, Outlook profile configuration prompts for email address, then continues to populate the Modern authentication page prompting for the password after which the profile will be configured. However, with SSO, Outlook auto populates the email address.
Once you click Connect, Seamless SSO is detected on the account and thereby configures Outlook without prompting for the password.
Edge: Without SSO, if you navigate to http://myapps.microsoft.com from an Edge browser, the page will take you to the login screen for Office 365. With Seamless SSO, this page will immediately take you to the available applications on your Office 365 account without prompting for an email address or password.
Please note that, you can always Sign Out and sign in as another account if you are not looking to use the Seamless SSO feature.