Is Office365 required for Azure AD?

Question

I'm looking forward to using Azure AD for authentication in an upcoming product from my company, and one thing we were particularly hoping for an easier way to setup a Security Token Service than that currently available with AD FS 2.0.  Few if any of our clients have Office365 accounts, however, and thus far I haven't seen documentation for setting up Azure AD with AD FS 2.0 (or in any other way without 365).  I'm a little confused.  As for questions, though:

- Does Windows Azure Active Directory require Office365? Currently, or for the foreseeable future as well?

- Apologies if my Google-fu is just failing me, but if Azure AD doesn't require Office365, is there documentation somewhere for setting it up in some other way?  Would that be AD FS 2.0?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Hi Sean,

thank you for your interest in Windows Azure AD!

Windows Azure AD does not require Office365; rather, Office365 is one of the first services that takes advantage of Windows Azure AD hence by subscribing to Office you get a Windows Azure AD tenant as part of the process. Another service whihc leverages Windows Azure AD already today is Intune, and others will come online as well.

As of today, in order to get one Windows Azure AD tenant you can subscribe to Office365 or Intune. Moving forward we'll add other venues of getting tenants, including via Windows Azure itself.

HTH,

Vittorio

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Vittorio [MSFT]

Answer 2

Adding to Vittorio reply, if you would like to achive any single sign on features using cloud AD you can use Web-SSO. It is not exactly replacement for ADFS, but you will get STS like feature what you are looking for. it can act as IDP to be configurated with any STS.

Please refer to Vittorio blog and I have written another blog on with screenshots on the same. It helps you to evaluate the SSO features of it. You can download samples from the locations mentioned in this blog.

If you want to play with cloud AD like adding, accessing, modifying users in cloud AD i would recommend you to go through graph API.

For thick clients and other smart devices you can use AAL (Azure authentication library) to authenticate against cloud AD.

Hope this additional information helps you more to have smooth sailing with cloud AD.

Happy programming

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Answer 3

Great, thanks for the clarifications, both of you.