Enable Azure Active Directory Access Control with Office 365 Azure Active Directory tenant

Question

I currently have an Office 365 tenant with around 1,400 users all licensed. We have enabled the Azure AD tenant with the same account and are now using Azure AD Dirsync to have same sign-on to Office 365.

We are now having an external Sharepoint site developed and have been offered either ADFS or Azure AD ACS as an authentication method. As we've already got an Azure AD subscription (through Office 365) I thought this would be the easiest method. However, when in my tenant on https://manage.windowsazure.com, I have access to Active Directory, can add a new directory but cannot add a new Access Control service. It's greyed out and says "not available" underneath.

I've tried talking to Office 365 support, who referred me to Azure support, who then said we don't have support so can't help. I've spoken to Azure sales and they've referred me to Azure support, who then guess what, said we don't have support.

Has anyone else managed to implement an Azure Access Control service from an Office 365 tenancy using the free Azure Active Directory subscription? I get the feeling I just need to buy a cheap Azure subscription and the option would become available, but without knowing for sure I'm a bit hesitant about taking the plunge.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I can imagine that you cannot use the free Azure subscription for this purpose because using the Access Control Service brings costs. The free subscription is not tied to any creditcard. When you have e.g. a pay-as-you-go subscription you should be able to create a ACS namespace. I just tried in one of my pay-as-you-go subscriptions.

You are (still) able to create a namespace but I suggest you to also take a look into the identity possibilities Azure AD itself has. Azure AD has currently only support for SAML 2.0 (and a lot of other protocols but they are not directly relevant for SharePoint). I know SharePoint (on-premises) only talks SAML 1.1 so that's where ACS comes in. You can read more about this topic here. Azure AD itself is going to support SAML 1.1. The only question is when. (see one of the comments from the source mentioned below this answer)

I also would make one remark about Azure AD ACS because this is going to be replaced by Azure AD. The only question left is when.

ACS Capabilities in Azure AD

As we've mentioned previously, we are adding ACS-like capabilities into Azure AD. In the coming months, as part of a feature preview Azure AD administrators will be able to add federation with social identity providers, and later custom identity providers to Azure AD. This will allow app developers to use Azure AD to simplify the identity implementation in their apps, similar to how developers use ACS today. We look forward to getting your feedback on the preview to improve these experiences.

Migrating ACS Customers to Azure AD

Once these new ACS capabilities of Azure AD are out of preview and generally available, we will start migrating ACS namespaces to use the new Azure AD capabilities.

Source: The future of Azure ACS is Azure Active Directory

Answer 2

Quick solution:

Create an Azure paid account. Add the administrator user of the paid account in the Office 365 directory, and set it as global administrator of this later directory (you can add users from other directories).

Then switch back to the paid account. The new global administrator will be able to manage the Office 365 directory and add a namespace.