Unable to sign-in to Office 2016 desktop apps. Sign-in disappears after entering Office 365 account email address

Anonymous
2017-09-06T18:12:13+00:00

I am helping someone in our Office 365 tenant with a strange sign-in problem that affects only his Windows profile, and the issue is NOT in the Credential Manager.

This is his home computer running Windows 10 Home, build 1703. He is running the latest Office 2016 (installed the click to run apps from Office 365)

The problem began after he changed his Office 365 password. He can sign-in to the Web apps on another computer, and he can sign into Office 2016 apps on the same computer using a different Windows profile. For the problematic profile he signs into Windows using his personal Microsoft account. Then he signs into Outlook and Office 2016 with his Office 365 for Business account. Shouldn't be a problem...I do the same thing at home. The issue is that Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. will prompt him to sign in. When he enters his Office 365 email address (UPN), the sign-in screen immediately disappears without prompting him for a password. The sign in fails and Outlook says "Disconnected... need password)." 

The first thing I checked was Credential Manager, because that is usually the issue for things like this. We removed everything Microsoft or Office related from credential manager. It didn't help. Then we removed everything from credential manager, and it still didn't help. Repairing and then reinstalling office did not help.

I know that the problem is in his Windows profile, because he can sign-in just fine on the secondary Windows profile we created. So my question is this:

What do I need to delete from the registry and/or from the C:\users\username\appdata folder to resolve this issue with his Windows profile?

Thank you,

Sean

Microsoft 365 and Office | Subscription, account, billing | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2018-01-31T22:51:17+00:00

Hi

after the first attempt by Microsoft, which seemed to have worked for me, after a couple of days, the issue returned.

This time, they asked me to try something else which is to force some kind of different login screen for the O365 account in Office 2016.

This is what I did (and since a couple of weeks, I have had no issues):

Go to the registry editor (Win+R; regedit)

go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft ->Office -> 16.0 ->Common -> Identity

Inside "Identity", create a new REG_DWORD value called "EnableADAL" and leave the value at 0

Restart the PC and try again to login from Office 2016. In my case, the logon screen was now different and it worked perfectly.

Hope this helps you

Thanks,

Bruno Sales

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-02-01T03:28:55+00:00

    Have you read through this thread? The answer is to remove the work/school account, from windows settings > accounts. That resolved it for me.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-02-13T15:06:54+00:00

    I don't believe this is a complete solution as it is extremely situation based; I am doing a Microsoft Intune roll out in my company which connects user computers to MDM and Azure AD through the work account. Users are not permitted to remove their work account from their profile based on our configuration policy as that would remove them from MDM and mark their device as non-compliant.

    Microsoft needs to find the root cause of this issue and resolve it without having users add and remove their work/school account connections.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-02-15T00:52:15+00:00

    THANK YOU, that fixed it for me. 

    Created the reg_dword "EnableADAL". The signin to Office 365 now presents me with a password panel and works properly.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-02-19T13:59:47+00:00

    Lessons Learned from my side after browsing several blogs:

    If you have an AD domain connected O365 account, make sure that you DO NOT connect your AD domain, e.g. "contoso.com" AD domain account to your Microsoft (work or school) account P****@contoso.com.

    In Windows 10, go to

    1. Settings --> Accounts --> Access work and school accounts
    2. Click Disconnect only for your Microsoft (work or school) account:P****@contoso.com. Make sure you are only connected to AD domain account: "contoso.com"
    3. Click Connect
    4. Sign in with O365 credentials
    5. Enter E-Mail
    6. Enter Password
    7. Skip connection to Windows

    Proceeding this way, I think your credentials are always grasped from (Azure) AD, not from a locally identity. *hope so at least*

    Best regards,

    Markus

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