Enabling Outlook 2019 for modern authentication

Question

Hi all,

I am trying to use conditional access with the outlook app that came installed with the home edition of Windows. Whenever I enabled conditional access MFA, it kept prompting me to enter my password over and over and again. I then realized that modern authentication was not enabled and I needed to modify the registry with the following:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity

Dword: EnableADAL = 1

My question is if there is a cleaner way to do this for all the hosts in the organization. I read Microsoft documentation and it stated that modern authentication should be enabled by default for outlook 2016. Since I am using Outlook 2019 I should be fine?

Answer 1

It should, yes. But you should still check whether the relevant keys have been modified via GPO or the cloud config service. And make sure Modern auth is enabled service-side, some older tenants might still have it disabled.

Answer 2

Nvm the above. I figured that by enabling the conditional access it would re-prompt me using modern authentication to log me in. However since we have pre-existing accounts logged into Outlook that did not use MFA, it kept prompting for password and not accepting it. We would either need to enable the reg key or delete the email accounts and re-add them. Thanks for your responses!