The Cleveland Institute of Art uses Microsoft 's Single Sign-on Service to provide Students, Faculty and Staff with access to multiple services by using a single CIA username and password. This guide intends to provide very basic information about Single Sign On and Microsoft. It will not go into detail, nor is it intended to provide any more than a basic understanding of the concepts involved.
What is Single Sign-On (SSO)?
Simply put, Single Sign-On (SSO) is a method for two or more services to communicate and recognize a user as the same person on a group of other services. A user is authenticated by one system which then passes on an identification/trust key or token recognized by the other system thus allowing the user access. Websites often allow visitors to sign up with Facebook or Google accounts which is a form of Single Sign-On.
How does Single Sign-On affect CIA users?
User accounts
CIA user accounts use the same username (sometimes the entire email address) and password.
Services available to access include:
- User based network access
- Outlook email for Faculty and Staff
- Microsoft 365
- CIAlerts (Omnilert) emergency notification system
- Microsoft provides a Single Sign-On solution for connecting web based services to CIA user accounts.
- The most visible use of Microsoft for a user at CIA is when logging into their Microsoft account.
- Signing-on to one account will allow a user to open another service directly.
- Links from myCIA take a user directly to the Microsoft sign on screen .
Microsoft provides CIA account owners the ability to manage their own passwords.
Microsoft password management includes:
- Security questions
- Account unlock for times when a password is entered incorrectly too many times
- Intentional password change
- Forgotten password reset
Because Microsoft connects to multiple systems password changes may take a few minutes to sync across them all.