O365 MFA – “Office Phone”

Multi-factor authentication is something that you should have enabled in your Azure or Office 365 tenant. It’s going to solve at least 90% of your problems about worrying if someone is going to ‘hack’ into your organization. That said, it can provide a few headaches of it’s own.

When your user is choosing their methods or means to authenticate, one of the options is to use their “Office Phone”. That great… But if you sync your on-prem AD to AzureAD then you’ll quickly realize that that option is grayed out and you can’t set it. You’ll get some message about contacting your administrator.

To set this number, simply edit the properties of your user in your on-prem AD.

• Open “Active Directory Users and Computers” and navigate to your user.
• Right-click on the user and choose ‘properties’.
• Under ‘Telephone’ enter the user’s phone number, country code first, like either of the examples below.
  • +1 8085551234
  • +1 8085551234 x123
• Click ‘OK’ to save the edits.

After you have finished editing the user, all you have to do is wait for next sync cycle. From then on, your users will be able to authenticate and login by using their work desk phone.