I upgraded to Office 2016 when it came out for one reason: multi-factor authentication for Outlook. I subscribe to Office 365 for business and have had multi-factor enabled for a while and it worked great for the website access. After upgrading, the Office desktop tools (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) now use it and ask for my login, password, and two-factor authentication token. However, the one I *WAS* interested in is not accepting my password.
Once your admin enables your organization with 2-step verification (also called. Sign in to Office 365 with your work or school account with your password like you. You'll get an app password that you can use with Outlook, Apple Mail, etc. Posted on January 15, 2017 by Paul Thurrott in iOS, Microsoft Consumer Services. If you configured two-step verification, and you did, generate an app password. I'm not a huge fan of desktop Outlook on Windows or the Mac, but it does.
When Outlook starts and asks for the password, it will not accept my standard password - only my app password (which I would like to delete) and does not query for multi-factor authentication. I even tried a clean wipe of my entire hard drive with the same results. Hi Echo, Thanks for the reply.
Unfortunately, some of your information is incorrect. While your information may have been true for Office 2013, I know as a matter of fact that you are not required to setup app passwords for Work 2016, Excel 2016, or Powerpoint 2016 since I have these applications installed and they require use of the second authentication factor (not app passwords). In fact, support for MFA was a significant enhancement for Outlook advertised by the Office team. I also take issue with your statement that app passwords are a way of *increasing* security. App passwords are actually a significant *decrease* in security in that they allow a two-factor method to by bypassed. In addition, they contain no special characters and are a fixed length; as such they are even weaker than the standard passwords allowed by Office 365.
If app passwords were the way to go, no one would be wasting time implementing two-factor authentication. Could you please check your sources again and see how two-factor authentication can be enabled on Outlook 2016 with Office 365 for business? Thanks, Chris. Hi Chris, Thank you for your feedback. I understand you want to know how to enable Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) on Outlook 2016 for your plan.
Whether we can enable MFA for Outlook 2016 also depends on what plan we are using. As Neo posted before, only Office 365 Enterprise plans can be configured for modern authentication so as to enable MFA. And the configuration for modern authentication is not supported in Office 365 for Business plans. MFA in other applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Are not affected by plan types. Therefore, these applications work fine for you while Outlook does not. Your understanding is highly appreciated.
Thanks, Gary Zhu. I wouldn't waste your time, like I have wasted mine, on this 'support' board.
If you read the thread carefully, you'll realize these guys either have no understanding of the English language or understanding of the products they are supposed to support (perhaps both?). My favorite was the guy who told me that ADAL cannot be included in Office 2016 and 'proved' it by linking to an image that not only stated it was, but did so by highlighting it and underlining it in red! I doubt anyone from the support who might actually know what they are doing reads these. It was my mistake posting to for 'support'. For reference, I have opened a ticket through the office 365 admin page. They have been no more useful, although none of them have said it shouldn't work.
However, three people have called me and they all insist on seeing my desktop. Once I launch it and they see the password doesn't work, they seem stumped and end the call. Of course that takes at least 30 minutes of going back and forth on hold with them. The last one took well over 45 minutes! They are 'escalating', but they all seem equally clueless.
Mike, when you mention that your copy of Outlook 2016 cannot connect without an App Password. Are you referring to Outlook connecting to the exchange account to fetch mail, or Outlook logging into the 'Office Account' to link to the connected services/license subscription, most recently used documents, onedrive, etc (like we have in Word/Excel/Powerpoint)? Remember, there's two different logins that Outlook will be performing when it starts up (more if you have more than 1 email account connected) I can confirm from my experiences with Office 2016. That Outlook 2016 does indeed work properly with 2 factor authentication when it comes to the 'Office Account' part (both when connecting to a Windows Live account, or an Office 365/Azure account). In Outlook 2016, the 'exchange' authentication DOES NOT support or understand the two factor authentication. App passwords are still required for all email accounts hosted by Exchange Online/Office 365 in Office 2016.