Why would Teams require authentication so quickly?

Question

I have been waiting for a long time, to get Microsoft Teams into my work environment. I work for a large state agency. Microsoft recently changed the licensing for Office 365 for Business (Government), by allowing Teams to be a part of it. Today, I saw it appear as an option for my Office 365 for Business. So, I got into Teams, created a new team for my work group, then sent an invitation to everyone in it. We've been using TFS team rooms for the last 3 years. I know that TFS team rooms is going away. That is, at least for me, one of the primary reasons I believe we should move to Teams. Plus the fact that you can do search from within Teams, something I could never do within TFS team rooms. I do tend to be an early adopter. I figured, now that Teams is in our Office 365 environment, Teams would be good to go.

But now I'm wondering if I jumped the gun a little bit. I have Teams running in my browser, waiting for the rest of my coworkers to get on board with it. I stepped away for about 15 minutes. When I came back, I found Teams had gotten into some sort of state where it needed to reauthenticate me. I suppose that makes sense, as I was away for 15 minutes. (Although my PC had gone into lock more before that, due to a GPO that locks all machines after 10 minutes of inactivity, so it isn't necessary what Teams to do that.) Nevertheless, Teams went into the weird action where it tried to reauthenticate me, but it couldn't. Believe me, if Teams is going to do that, all of my coworkers are immediately going to give up on it and never try Teams again. I've been pushing for adopting Teams for a long time. I'm OK with re-issuing another re-try, but like I said, my coworkers are not.

So tell me, is Teams still flaky enough that it might not reauthenticate someone after 10+ minutes of inactivity? If that is the case, then I can guarantee that for all my coworkers that is a show stopper.

Answer 1

Hello Rod,

Is it Teams also require frequently authentication without having locked your PC?

Make the following changes to IE settings, either with Administrator rights or a Group Policy Object:

Under Internet Options > Privacy > Advanced, accept First-Party and Third-Party cookies, and check the box for Always allow session cookies.

Click Internet Options > Trusted Sites > Sites, and add all of the following:

https://*.microsoft.com

https://*.microsoftonline.com

https://*.teams.skype.com

https://*.teams.microsoft.com

https://*.sfbassets.com

https://*.skypeforbusiness.com

Microsoft Teams FQDNs https://support.office.com/en-us/article/office-365-urls-and-ip-address-ranges-8548a211-3fe7-47cb-abb1-355ea5aa88a2?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US#bkmk_teams

You can try Team desktop client it can be downloaded and installed by end users directly from https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads if they have the appropriate local permissions.

Get clients for Microsoft Teams- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/get-clients

Thanks,