![]() Behind the scenes the sign-in assistant is taking care of that for you. You’re not supposed to have to put your Office 365 password when you click into the Office 365 portal or Outlook Web Access or Sharepoint portal. Its job is to get the Office 365 credentials from a user when the program is installed, then provide them to the Office 365 service whenever they are required, all completely invisibly. The new sign-in program runs completely unseen. You can imagine how much fun it is to advise people what to uninstall when the list in Control Panel looks like this. To Microsoft’s eternal shame, the new program has an almost identical name, “Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant,” apparently to make this as confusing as possible. A different program is installed for Office 365 and the old sign in program is removed. That was never clearly understood by end users so Microsoft reworked the process for Office 365. The only answer was to shut down Outlook completely and sort things out with the sign in program. When Outlook occasionally became confused and displayed the above password prompt, no password would satisfy it. Its job was to log each person into the service and keep them logged in through thick and thin. The prior Microsoft service, Microsoft Online Services (aka Business Productivity Online Suite, aka BPOS) installed the Microsoft Online Services Sign In program, which ran at startup and displayed its little blue icon continuously down in the lower right corner. Take a peek under the hood to understand why it’s not supposed to do that. (Again, to be clear, most people don’t see this at all. Most people find that checking the box to “remember my credentials” makes the prompt disappear for days or weeks but others have it popping up frequently, as often as every few minutes. It’s usually when Outlook starts but occasionally happens in the middle of the day. ![]() It’s an interesting and tricky problem!īasically, at random times Outlook pops up a box and asks for the password for the Office 365 account. So although I’m going to describe a technical issue, it’s a fairly insignificant one that has affected less than a dozen people in my personal experience. Smaller businesses are being migrated from the older Microsoft Online Services platform my clients’ experiences have not been completely smooth but no data has been lost and support for minor glitches has been readily available. ![]() ![]() My clients are ecstatic that I can set passwords not to expire. There has been no downtime for the last few months. ![]() Microsoft Office 365 has been tremendously successful so far, certainly from a sales perspective (millions of subscriptions, although the exact number is kept under wraps), but more importantly it’s also been successful from a technical perspective. ![]()
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