Microsoft Teams is the most used collaboration tool used globally. It is a platform complete with document sharing, online meetings, and many more extremely useful features for business communications.
Microsoft Teams is incredibly straightforward and user-friendly, but imagine if you cannot even sign in to this app!!
I will be talking about few scenarios which could be responsible for teams sign in issues. In addition, I will also talk about some of the crucial troubleshooting steps one must consider while working on such issues.
Teams Clients:
Teams works on a browser, desktop and mobile devices. ( Please note there are meeting room and SIP devices as well, but they are not considered for simplicity)
The authentication to teams relies heavily on Azure Active directory. AAD( Azure active directory) uses modern authentication. Modern Authentication in Teams facilitates simple and secure single sign-on experience and refrains users from entering their credentials in multiple platforms to sign-in. For Windows platform, if users have already entered their credentials in any of the Microsoft 365 apps or signed into Windows using their work or school account, they need not enter their credentials again when the Teams app is launched. (Modern authentication is enabled by default for directories created on or after August 1, 2017)
Authentication Topologies
In the era of cloud technology, most of the organizations have either moved to cloud, or planning to take their infrastructure to cloud. However, in some cases importance of on-premise infrastructure cannot be neglected. Authentication is one such crucial aspect.
Below you will read about different authentication topologies used by Microsoft to allow its users to authenticate to cloud apps.
Cloud Only: In this topology, there is no on premise piece involved. Accounts are created directly on cloud (Azure). However, it is purely cloud, yet it is powerful enough.
Password Hash Synchronization: In PHS( Password Hash Synchronization ), the hash of the password is synchronized to Azure AD almost immediately, and this enables a user to use the same username and password to sign-in to on-premises or cloud resources.
Passthrough : In passthrough authentication, the password is not stored on azure AD in any form. The user sign in request is validated directly with the on premise active directory. The only need is the outbound ports must be open.
Federation: With this approach, user can login to all cloud apps using on-premises credentials. In order to implement this, your company need to setup AD FS server to allow authentication and authorization requests.
Teams Sign in Flow:
Launch Teams: Once you launch Microsoft teams, you will be prompted to enter username and password.
Home discovery: With the help of sign in address (UPN), teams uses that to discover, where to send that sign in request ( to which tenant in O365).
Sign in request Home realm discovery Signed-in
Support Logs for Teams sign-in issue:
There are times when you need to troubleshoot sign in issues using logs. There are different type of logs files which can help in identifying the potential cause.
Debug Logs:
To collect debug logs for Microsoft teams sign in issue, you can press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+1 on your keyboard. These logs can be shared with Microsoft support team for analysis.
Azure AD sign in logs:
You can also download logs from azure active directory using below steps:
Open azure AD portal, browse to Monitoring section and select sign-in logs. Download relevant logs file from the list.
Collect Support files:
Right click on the teams icon on system tray and click collect support files
Conditional Access:
Conditional Access is a feature of Azure AD that enables organizations to define specific conditions for how users authenticate and gain access to applications and services.
Note: Conditional access requires Azure AD P1 license or above.
It is important not to rule out conditional access policies while troubleshooting teams sign in issues. Your organisation might have set up an conditional access policy that could refrain you from signing in to teams in certain situations. (ex, not connected to corporate network, not connected to enrolled device etc)
What one can do with conditional access?
· It can help grant/deny access to apps (Including MS Teams)
· One can specify rules to do simple tasks. Ex, if I wish to make any modification, it will need MFA.
· The rules can be applied to individual user or a group.
· What devices can access any specific app
· ….and many more
To access conditional policy, open Azure AD admin center. Browse to security and click conditional access on left.
Conclusion
With so much to offer, microsoft teams has become an important tool to accomplish our day to day work. From the administrative point of view, hopefully, this article might give you a correct lead to fix teams sign in issue for your customer. However, This article does not talk about how to check logs using fiddler or Charles proxy, but it is a good to have skill if you know how to deep dive teams sign in process.
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