Microsoft O365 announces support for SAML 2.0 federation with Office 365

SAML, for Security Assertion Markup Language, is an XML based open standard for exchanging AuthN and AuthZ. SAML helps with SSO, Federated and Web. It was perplexing why SharePoint 2013 would not support SAML 2.0 while ADFS 2.0 released few years ago as a download for Windows Server 2008, did support SAML 2.0.

Recently I was at SharePoint conference 2014 in Las Vegas. I had the opportunity to meet up with Principal Program Manager and discussed this. He listened to the good and bad and said that he will take this feedback to the team. A week later MS announces SAML 2.0 support for O365! Wow, that was fast guys!

Well I know my feedback has nothing to do with this announcement but I am pretty glad that we have this available in O365. Question still, does SharePoint in O365 supports this? and what is the plan for SharePoint 2013 on-prem? Hmm, may be I should touch base with MS to find out more. Anyways read about it here:

Announcing support for SAML 2.0 federation with Office 365

What is the difference between SAML 2 and SAML 1.1? Check it out here:

http://saml.xml.org/differences-between-saml-2-0-and-1-1

Comments

AADConnect: Attribute-based Filtering

As a hands-on practice area lead, I get to deliver projects both directly as an architect, and indirectly as an Engagement Manger. In one recent project, one of my Higher Ed clients wanted to setup attribute-based filtering. The matter got escalated to me and I helped the client in setting this up. I documented the process to my client and thought there may be others who may find this helpful as well. In this article I will not be going into what AADConnect is and how to deploy the same. I will assume that you already know about AADConnect and possibly have deployed the same as well. One of the features of AADConnect is the ability to filter objects that are synched to Azure AD. The default and the recommended configuration are to sync all objects in all domains in the configured forest. There are cases, however, that requires us to filter the objects to be synched. AADConnect provides the following filtering options: Group-base...

Office 365 access: Enforcing VPN with ADFS

Recently, I was asked for possible solutions to enforce VPN connection to access Office 365. This seems odd at first, for this is against one of the tenets of Office 365, accessing service from anywhere and on any device. But then there is always a certain use case that needs to be addressed. In this case, the customer had deployed Office 365 and federated using ADFS, a textbook deployment with 2 ADFS server farm, and 2 WAPs in the DMZ. Within the Microsoft 365 world, Intune and Conditional access would enable for enforcing policies. However, that will also require the customer to acquire additional licenses beyond O365 E3, which my customer did not want to do. I compiled some of the possibilities with ADFS to enforce VPN connectivity. Although I do not recommend anyone to bypass the features, I want to share this out to get some feedback from the community, to see if this is such a common scenario, or if anyone implemented any of these or other cost-effective solutions...

Promoted Links - Wrap and size tiles with Client Side Rendering

SharePoint 2013 introduces Promoted Links list and the web part is unbelievable hit with my client users. Anyone who has seen it wants it in their team/portal sites. With increase in usage comes new requirements. And so the requirement did come, for reducing the size of promoted link tiles just so it fits into a web part zone of a custom page layout that was being used. User was adding 3 tiles and the third tile was displayed only partially and a header with scroll buttons was displayed for navigation. Users would prefer to see full 3 tiles in the row. If there are more than 3 items in the list, then they would prefer that the tiles be wrapped to the next row. Picture below shows out of the box Promoted Links output. There are 6 items in the list. Notice that the Green tile is truncated: To display the 3 full tiles in a row within the web part zone required that the tile size be reduced. Promoted links are rendered using Client Side Rendering ...

UralTalk

Search This Blog