A colleague of mine recently solved one of the biggest pain points I have dealt with regarding Office365 – that is, Microsoft’s seemingly hit-or-miss modern authentication.
Symptoms look like this:
1. Outlook client can’t connect and/or authenticate for end-users
2. Turning on Azure MFA for an end-user ruins their life (and yours) because all office applications, teams, etc. break.
3. Admins have an impending sense of “dread” when setting up systems for new users because 80% of the time they are going to spend hours sorting out the above issues.
4. You call Microsoft Support complaining of these issues and they are eventually stumped and tell you to rebuild the desktop/laptop from scratch… great for end-users that deal with this issue 1 year into the job and rather like their systems as-is… -or- MS Support tells you to pop a registry key into the end-user’s system which just disables Modern Authentication all together – which may fix Outlook but leaves many many other things broken…
If any of that sounds familiar, I highly recommend you read the article he published on linked-in…. this is THE SILVER BULLET to end your Microsoft Authentication woes: Solving Modern Authentication Issues with Office 365
I also document fixes like this here so this is the powershell that he wrote up to run on end-user systems experiencing these issues (stolen from article, all credit goes there)…
If that returns NOTHING then there is your issue… So proceed to run this:
Then – if you did the thing (per MS support) where you added that registry key to disable Modern Auth… undo that and then clear cached credentials…
cmdkey /list | ForEach-Object{if($_ -like "*Target:*"){cmdkey /del:($_ -replace " ","" -replace "Target:","")}}
Once the above has all been run… Office365 authentication woes magically disappear and Azure MFA starts working… for everything.
My friend also provided this solution to Microsoft Support (in full) and they thanked him so hopefully other people won’t continue wrestling with this issue because support can NOW provide the right answer. (there are LOTS of people dealing with this right now…)
Cheers!
REFERENCE:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/solving-modern-authentication-issues-office-365-chris-leet/
Awesome work dude. This helps a lot.
Thanks, my colleague was the one that discovered it! It’s amazing because modern auth finally just WORKS and Azure MFA roll-out is no longer anger inducing for everyone involved.
Truly, You and your colleague deserve a medal. Excellent work.
I’d been using the EnableADAL = 0 registry hack to fix 365 login prompts not appearing for several months now, and only recently realised it was breaking MFA in the process.
Thanks! – Microsoft has made it official guidance apparently so I am glad it finally made it up. This frustrated us, literally, for years :/
Microsoft has officially acknowledged the issue and provided guidance on this https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/troubleshoot/authentication/automatic-authentication-fails
Hooray! – thanks for this 🙂
thanks brother it really worked, much appreciated.
Late to the party, but just letting you know this really helped the mind boggling issue we had with 1 user.
Thank you very much!
Hi
Thanks for the tip, it is really helpfull.
But i’m having one question :
This solution works on my server, but it looks like it’s working only on the account you run those lines, not for others end-users on the server.
It is a RDS server with VHDX profiles stored on a broker.
I was wondering if you had a solution about this, or any details of how this plugins is working/stored ?
Thanks again !
@Theo – Yes that would be correct – this is making changes to the HKCU portion of the registry as the last step – CU –> “Current User”. I haven’t looked at this in a long time (and haven’t worked with RDS in a longer time than that) but first I would try to find out if there is a Group Policy that could be used to set that specific key. Additionally, you could also work on some form of powershell automation script that could be run to do the rest (if needed, because you are using an RDS server I am not sure if all software is shared across all profiles or not) at user login. Hope this at least points you in the right direction. If you have a large number of user profiles, you are definitely gonna want some kind of automation.
In one of our customer’s environment suddenly we got this issue. The outlook authentication was working fine and suddenly it broke. The MFA was already enabled.
The problem is outlook authentication is stopped working suddenly on one of the proxy (which is a bypass proxy) on which it was working previously. We have Azure MFA already enabled from long time and issue just appeared now.
When we are switching to another proxy, the authentication working fine.
Microsoft suggested to disable the modern authentication till the time issue is not fixed.
As per their troubleshooting there are issues in hybrid devices in authentication here are some logs which they highlighted:
——————————————-
sso state
——————————————-
AzureAdPrt : No
AzureAdPrtAuthority :
EnterprisePrt : No
EnterprisePrtAuthority :
——————————————-
Also have issues with WAM:
——————————————–
User State
——————————————–
NgcSet : No
WorkplaceJoined : No
WamDefaultSet : Error
——————————————–
Any help would be appreciated.