Office 365 Custom Branded Log-in Pages

One of my favorite Office 365 teams had a really cool announcement yesterday I have been waiting on.

Over the years, many customers have wanted to have custom branded page when a user logs-in. This was important for branding but even more important because I had customers wanting to put custom disclaimers to users when logging in to Office 365.

In the past the only way to achieve this was through making modifications in ADFS to introduce a new page as part of the log-in process. This was commonly done to add-in other form factors for authentication. The drawback of this approach was that it first required federation and not all Office 365 customers are using federation; they use cloud based IDs. Second, this required additional custom work on the organization’s ADFS deployment. This new change removes this requirement.

This new sign in page is actually a feature that has been available to customers who are Azure Active Direct (AD) Premium customers and now this feature is being provided directly to Office 365 customers without requiring a purchase of Azure Active Direct (AD) Premium.

Now this solution is available to all Office 365 customers, regardless if you are federated or using cloud based IDs. The configuration of this will be available off of the Office 365 Admin portal.

The user experience will be that user will see the Office 365 standard log-in screen, however once they enter their UPN, the user will be directed to the custom branded page.

The announcement was made here - http://blogs.office.com/2015/02/17/sign-page-branding-cloud-user-self-service-password-reset-office-365/

Here are the details adding a custom branded Sign In and Access Panel Page - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn532270.aspx. All the technical details are locating here to give you an understanding of the page elements you can edit and how to apply those changes.

Another note they made in this bog, which is good is this log-in branding can be coordinated with the recent announcement for theming here - http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/02/personalize-office-365-experience-selecting-themes/.