Basic Authentication Retirement for legacy protocols in Exchange Online

Major update: Announcement started
Applied To: All customers
  Beginning October 13, 2020, we will retire Basic Authentication for EWS, EAS, IMAP, POP and RPS to access Exchange Online. Note: this change does not impact SMTP AUTH.

There are several actions that you and/or your users can take to avoid service disruptions on client applications, and we describe them below. If no action is taken, client applications using Basic Authentication for EWS will be retired on October 13, 2020.

Any application using OAuth 2.0 to connect to these protocols, will continue to work without change or interruption.

[What do I need to do to prepare for this change?]

You have several options on how to prepare for the retirement of Basic Authentication.   You can start updating the client applications your users are using to versions that support OAuth 2.0 today. For mobile device access, there are several email apps available that support Modern Authentication, but we recommend switching to the Outlook app for iOS and Android as we believe it provides the best overall experience for your M365 connected users. For desktop/laptop access, we encourage the use of the latest versions of Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. All Outlook versions including, or newer than, Outlook 2013 fully support OAuth 2.0. If you have written your own code using these protocols, you will need to update your code to use OAuth 2.0 instead of Basic Authentication, you can reach out to us on stack overflow with the tag exchange-basicauth if you need some help.   If you or your users are using a 3rd party application, which uses these protocols, you will either need to   reach out to the 3rd party app developer who supplied this application to update it to support OAuth 2.0 authentication

-or- assist your users to switch to an application that’s built using OAuth 2.0.  
We are in the process of building reports that will help you identify any impacted users and client applications in your organization. We will make these reports available to you in the next few months and communicate their availability via a follow-up Message center post.

Please click Additional Information to learn more about this retirement.

Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services

Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services
Major update: Announcement started
Applied To: All customers
As previously announced via blog and MC175274 (March, 2019), Office 2013 clients’ connections to commercial Office 365 services will not be supported after October 13, 2020. After this date, ongoing investments in the Office 365 cloud services – including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business – will proceed based on post-Office 2013 requirements. We recommend that organizations with Office 2013 clients consider migrating to Office 365 ProPlus.

Support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 connections to Office 365 cloud services will continue until October 2023. Up to date information on current system requirements can be found under on the Office system requirements page, with related timelines available in the Office system requirements matrix.

[How does this affect me?]

Microsoft will not take any active measures to block older Office clients, such as Office 2013 and Office 2010, from connecting to Office 365 services. However, legacy clients attempting to connect to a modern, always up- to- date cloud service may experience performance and reliability issues. Customers will face an increased security risk, and may find themselves out of compliance depending on specific regional or industry requirements. Microsoft Help may not be able to resolve issues that arise due to unsupported service connections.

[What do I need to do to prepare for this change?]

In order for you to better understand whether and how your organization is affected by this change, and where you need to migrate users, there are two System Center Configuration Manager dashboards (updated as part of version 1902) that can help:

– the SCCM Product Lifecycle dashboard allows you to see which versions of Office are running on your desktops, to determine which will need updated Office apps to help ensure a seamless connection to Office 365 services
– the Office 365 ProPlus Upgrade Readiness report on the Office 365 client management dashboard helps to identify desktops in your organization that are ready to upgrade to Office 365 ProPlus with high confidence.

Use these dashboards to identify users on Office 2010 and Office 2013 clients, deploy Office365 ProPlus or a supported version of Office perpetual to those desktops, and ensure that they will have supported access to Office 365 services after October 13, 2020.