single sign on to Office 365 with ADFS Azure AD solution…possible to only ask for creds once?

Question

I'm working on a project for an education institution and we currently have live@edu set up with the SSO Toolkit 4.5. We have a portal (home grown) that our users log in to using their AD credentials (local AD only) and then we wire up the certificate to pass up to live@edu so they're not prompted again for login creds when they view their MS mail.

MS is going to stop support for this methodology at the end of the year and so we're now in the process of upgrading our environment to work with Office 365 education. As such, we have set up and ADFS with an Azure AD but I'm struggling getting a process in place where our users still only need to enter their login credentials once on our portal (which is externally facing) and then providing them with a token that will persist on their trip to Office 365. Right now it works as follows: users go to portal.microsoftonline.com and enter their email address. When they tab out of that field, MS checks and finds our domain so then redirects the user back to a login page for our ADFS solution. At this point, users are required to log in again (if they're not already logged in) or they're taken to the MS offerings.

Bottom line, instead of making a "single" sign on solution, they've added more places that our users need to provide their credentials (or just username (email address)).

I'm wondering if there's a solution we can provide to our users similar to the SSO Toolkit 4.5 way of doing things where we can authenticate our users only once on our portal, then provide them access to the O365 services?

I'm not an infrastructure guy at all so I may have provided some misinformation above as to how we have things set up. What I do know from our current implementation is that we need to use "WS-Federation".

I'm wondering if a SAML approach would solve the issue I've described above and let us just challenge for credentials once on our portal page.

any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

Answer 1

This is indeed possible. Read about AzureAD access panel ( http://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2014/10/30/customize-your-app-sso-experience-with-azure-ad.aspx )

1) User will navigtate to https://myapps.microsoft.com/ {your_school_domain_name.edu} 2) they will be directly redirected to your ADFS server for signin 3) once they signin they will see the list of apps assigned to them (including O365 apps) 4) click on OWA/SharePoint icon and navigate to the app without having to sign in again.

If you quickly want to test 1) and 2) open an in-private/cognito browser and navigate to https://myapps.microsoft.com/microsoft.com - you will not see O365 or Azure AD signing page - instead you'll be taken directly to the MSIT ADFS signin page.

Hope this helps.