October 13th, 2020; Jira and Microsoft modern authentication.

Question

Our Jira uses the o365 service for e-mails and Microsoft has announced that on October 13th, 2020, they will stop supporting IMAP, etc. for office365 and are going for "modern authentication".

Even if there's  +year before the deadline, there are many in our organization that sees this as a excuse for getting rid of Jira. And they are demanding that I show them some proof that Jira can handle this "modern authentication", they are very vocal. ( they are Microsoft experts and for them everything non-microsoft is a big nope..)

Questions:

1) The Microsoft announcement talks about "basic auth", does it also include "secure_imap" (IMAPS) ???

2) Is there a URL into some reputable source that clearly states that on October 13th, 2020, Jira will be ready and usable with Microsoft's "modern authentication"??

I know...my questions are quite silly but sadly also important. I really need help with this question, so that I can end this "IT- soap opera" thing about jira and "modern authentication."

Andy Heinzer · Answer

As an update those issues I created were closed as duplicates.  Instead please see:

* JRASERVER-63917 
* JRACLOUD-63917

These feature requests do appear to be gaining traction for both Server and Cloud platforms, so I would expect that support seems likely in the future.  I don't have an exact timetable for these, but for anyone seeking more info on this topic in regards to how Jira will handle it, I'd recommend watching these issues instead of my previous ones.

Thanks

Andy

Laur Mõtus · Answer

This comes late, but thanks for the answer !!  :)

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Laur,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.  I was previously unaware that Office 365 was planning to end support for this.  I found a blog that indicates this in some more detail in End of support for Basic Authentication access to Exchange Online API’s for Office 365 customers.  I can certainly see that this would negatively affect Jira server admins that are currently using an Office 365 account for Jira to process incoming email messages.

So far, I have not found any existing documented plans to update Jira for this, so I went ahead and created the feature requests that I believe would be needed to plan for this for both Jira Server and Jira Cloud, you can find them in:

* JRASERVER-70154 
* JRACLOUD-73240

To try to answer your questions:

I am afraid I have not been able to clarify if Office 365 plans to extend this EOL support to Secure IMAP (IMAPS).  All the documentation I have been searching through on this topic seems to avoid discussing that point.  Not sure if it's an oversight, or planned to maintain it.  That blog post suggest how to best reach out to them with more questions on this topic

Reach out to us on stack overflow with the tag [exchange-basicauth] if you have questions around migrating away from Basic Authentication.

As for if Jira will be ready when this change happens, well, I don't know for sure if that will happen or not within Jira. I am not in a position to say with any certainty if this feature might be implemented or not. But I would suggest watching the suggestion ticket I have linked above.  Should Jira implement a change to support this, that ticket will be updated to reflect this and will indicate what version of Jira will contain this change.

Cheers,

Andy