MFA for Office 365

What's MFA?

MFA stands for Multi-Factor Authentication. The University is introducing MFA for all Microsoft online services (Teams, email, SharePoint, Office 365, and so on).

This means that when you use one of these services, as well as being asked for your username and password you will occasionally also be asked to validate your login in some other way, usually by providing a 6 figure number, different each time.

You can do this in a number of ways. For example, you can use an authenticator app on your smartphone or other device, or you can validate using a text message, or by means of a phone call to a phone number which you provide - perhaps your office phone if you have one.

Advance warning

Before you are enrolled in MFA, you will be mailed with full details.

To find out more

The University’s MFA site tells you all about the MFA rollout, including how to register validation methods, and which ones might be right for you. It's simpler than it might sound.

Need help?

There's a dedicated MFA support team to provide help when you need it, 7 days a week.

MFA authenticators on DICE

On DICE you can generate your MFA codes using otpclient. There's also a command line version, otpclient-cli.
Each of these has a man page, but there's also an excellent writeup of how to use them on the otpclient wiki at How to use OTPClient (external link).

To add otpclient as an authenticator for your Office 365 account, use the University's instructions for Alternative authenticator apps.