Update: The Office 365 preparatory maintenance changes originally scheduled for Monday, May 11 (as described in the email that ITS sent out on April 27) has been rescheduled for Thursday, May 14. This is likely due to the issues they ran into with Outlook (read more on the Outlook issues).
Central IT has informed us that they are making additional changes to the Multi-Factor Authentification (MFA) that will affect how you access your WSU email accounts. Here is the information they sent out to the systems managers list. Review the list at the end to see if you will be impacted.
MFA Changes Ahead
On August 4, 2020, Information Technology Services (ITS) will change our current authentication method when signing in to Office 365, as part of the MFA reschedule. As of that date, access to Office 365 will require Okta authentication which will include multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Users will be receiving a notification on Monday, April 27, alerting them to the new MFA implementation schedule. You (IT support people) may begin receiving some questions regarding this notification. It is valid, and we ask that you (me) assist them or route them to the Crimson Service Desk.
Why is Campus ITS making this change?
The change is being made to improve email security and protect WSU data. Some legacy authentication methods are generally not compatible with MFA, or om some cases do not support MFA at all.
What does this mean for customers?
If any of the following applies to your customers, they will be impacted by this change in some manner:
If they use:
- Outlook 2013/2010/2007 to access their email, or
- A client like Thunderbird or any other IMAP or POP client to access their email, or
- Mobile email applications other than Outlook on iOS, Outlook on Android, or
- Your customers set up email on their mobile device prior to May 11, 2020, or
- They have an application or service configured to use a protocol that will be disabled (i.e. IMAP, EWS, etc.), or
- They have an application or service that requires basic authentication and does not support authentication with Okta, or
- They have an application or service that does not support MFA with Okta.