Guests at UU will need 2FA for Office 365 (Teams, OneDrive, etc.) from 3 May on

As a university employee, you need two-factor authentication (2FA) when logging in to Office 365 applications such as Teams and OneDrive. Guests at the UU do not need 2FA to login at the moment. This will change as of May 3.

Why is 2FA required for guests?

At the UU, we regularly invite guests to our Office 365 environment. By guests, we mean people without a Solis-id, for example someone from another organisation. They might collaborate with us in Teams, or have access to shared documents on OneDrive. Currently, our invited guests do not need to use 2FA to gain access: their username and password will do. This is a risk: should a guest’s login details be compromised, an unauthorised person could use them to access our Office environment.

2FA for guests as well from 3 May 2022 onwards

To increase security, 2FA for guests will be introduced in our Office environment from 3 May. Both new and existing guests need to have 2FA set to gain (or keep) access to the Office 365 environment (such as Teams, files, etc.) of the UU.

2FA not required for single meetings

If a guest only wants to attend a meeting via Teams, 2FA will not be required. This is for example the case when you’ve sent an invitation via Outlook to a guest to join a meeting. Guests can simply click the link in the invitation e-mail and join the meeting.

What should you do as a UU employee?

When you invite guests, or when they already participate in Teams or other Office 365 applications, your guests may need to set up 2FA (also called MFA by Microsoft) for their account first. If they need help with that, you can refer them to this manual. This manual is also available via www.uu.nl/2fa.

Need help?

You can find answers to many questions in the Frequently Asked Questions. You can also contact the IT Service Desk.

Switch on Security!

We’d like to ask you to make safe decisions while you work and to use the tools that protect you. This might require some getting used to, but it is the simplest way to ‘switching on security’. This will protect both your data and the data of all your colleagues. Switch to working securely  

Marijn van Ellen