Month: August 2011

Office 365 – Two Factor authentication

As we have seen, passive clients have a different connection scenario than active clients. As passive clients can actually input data, this can be used to configure the request for additional authentication data. When users are accessing Outlook Web Access they are redirected to the federation services to retrieve their token. This is where we can add the additional authentication hop. Users who reside within the internal network are not required to add additional information as their device and location are already in a trusted location. Therefore this authentication path is excempted from the picture below and described later.

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Office 365 – Exchange interaction Design

Office 365 is booming.. everyday new companies decide to make the switch to easy online messaging and collaboration services on the cloud. While the cloud should make life easier for administrators, setting up the co-existence environment seems a bit harder. Although Microsoft has tons of help material available .This post is to clearify the interaction when settings up a co-existence environment with Office 365.

For this example I have added a TMG server to validate the requests. As many companies have additional firewalls in front of the TMG server, this is also displayed. And the TMG server serves another role to in the advanced setup, where we explain that it is possible to have OWA users use two-factor authentication while ActiveSync users can continue to authenticate against the federation server with their “passive” clients. (see the next post)

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