We are happy to announce that we now support OAuth2 authentication for Microsoft Office365 email accounts.

What is OAuth2 Authentication?

OAuth2 Authentication is a more secure method to connect to your Office365 mail account through Deskpro. 

With Basic Authentication, your helpdesk will login to your emails with a standard username and password. This will be the same username and password which you would use to access that email account through other means, so if you need to change your email account password, you will need to make the same change in Deskpro.

With OAuth2, your helpdesk is given a unique login token which it can use to access emails, which will be separated from your username and password. This means you can change your password and use multi-factor authentication without having to make any changes to your helpdesk. You can also be assured that your helpdesk can only access your emails, and not other features on your account, as this token is sandboxed with only the permissions Deskpro needs, and nothing else.

Do I need this?

- If you use Office365 as your mail service, and you're an On-Premise customer, then the short answer is yes. 

Back in March 2018, Microsoft announced that they will be removing support for basic authentication for Office365 and their Exchange Online products for October 2020, requiring the use of OAuth2 authentication to connect to their mail accounts. Due to recent events, this has now been postponed until the second half of 2021 for existing tenants, but will still be enforced for any new tenants as of October 2020.

As Deskpro On-Premise connects directly to your Office365 mail service, you will need to use OAuth2, as the Basic Authentication will cease to work once Microsoft pulls support in the second half of 2021.  Due to this, we highly recommend migrating over to OAuth2 as soon as possible in order to prevent any downtime when Basic Authentication is disabled.

- If you use Office365 as your mail service, and you're a Cloud customer, then the short answer is possibly. 

Deskpro Cloud uses a different method to handle incoming emails, and can be configured to send emails without connecting to Office365. If your helpdesk is configured in this method, then no, this feature will not be required. 

However, if your helpdesk is configured to send emails through SMTP, then yes, OAuth2 will need to be enabled. We have made two new connection types available for Office365 in order to use OAuth2; Office365 (Exchange) and Office365 (SMTP).

How do I set this up?

If you are an On-Premise customer, you will need to update to 2020.2.6 , and the OAuth2 support will be available. Cloud customers will see this feature roll out shortly.

We have prepared some guides which should explain the process on preparing the OAuth Client within your Office365 admin center, and configuring OAuth2 on both Deskpro On-Premise and Deskpro Cloud.