Converged Microsoft Account and Azure Active Directory Programming Model – #Microsoft, #Azure
Wow, finally Microsoft is doing something about the Microsoft Account and Azure AD identity “mess”! 🙂
Until now, building an application that worked with both personal and business accounts from Microsoft required integrating with two different technology stacks. Not only that, you had to have separate buttons in your app where your user needed to choose, up front, to sign-in with a personal account or a work or school account.
With the v2 app model preview, it is possible to sign-in both personal and work users with a single button. Let’s take a quick look at the end user’s experience. We begin with your application, with the addition of a “Sign-in with Microsoft” button.
We’re using the Microsoft brand because end users don’t know about Azure or Azure Active Directory. But they do know that Windows, Outlook, OneDrive, Xbox, and Office 365 are services from Microsoft and they need an account from Microsoft to sign-in there.
When the user clicks the button, they come to a consolidated sign-in page:
The user enters their username. Under the covers we figure out if the username corresponds to a personal account or a work account. Then we take the user to the right page to enter their password. Today this may involve a redirect – in the future we’ll optimize this out.
Read more here!
//Richard