If you’re setting this up on a phone without a fingerprint reader, you may not get two factors. For me, that’s two factors (my phone and my thumb). For me to log into my Microsoft account, I need to approve the log-in in the Microsoft authenticator app then scan my thumb on my iPhones thumb scanner. This feature is called two-step verification, but I’m calling it two-factor authentication. Here I should take a break to talk about two-step verification vs two-factor authentication. Once you install that app on your phone, you can proceed to .įrom the Microsoft account webpage, you can navigate to Security > More Security Options > Two-Step Verification and click the link to setup two-step verification. I have an iPhone, but the app works the same on Android as well. This new authentication method uses the Microsoft Authenticator app on your phone. This feature is not yet available for Office 365 accounts, but I’m guessing it will be at some point in the future so I’m going to mention it here. There is a cool new MFA option for your Microsoft account (,, etc.) that allows you to not use your password at all. MFA for your Microsoft accountīefore I get into the MFA updates for Office 365, I wanted to touch on a nifty little bit of MFA functionality for Microsoft accounts. Luckily, Microsoft has made some strides in the MFA story for Office 365 since my September blog post, so let’s pick up where that post left off… “Which applications do I need to use the app password for?” The biggest change I want to address in this blog post is using MFA for PowerShell connections to Office 365 services. It will most likely be years before Microsoft can build all of the services within Office 365 into a coherent and operational framework, if such a change could even happen. The Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) story for the individual parts of Office 365 is, unfortunately, still disjointed and inconsistent. The original problem of Office 365 not being a single application, but rather a collection of applications, still exists. Since the cloud refuses to stand still, it looks like it’s time to update that post with some new information. Back in September of last year, I wrote an article about Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365.

Office365 mfa