Showing posts with label Office. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Office. Show all posts

2021-02-09

IT/TECH: Office 365 / Microsoft 365 - Outlook stucks in redirect loop and everything you found isn't working... you might have shot yourself in your foot...

 Epilogue

Today I wasted about 4h to figure out why I couldn't login to https://outlook.office.com respective https://outlook.office365.com nor I was able to connect to https://outlook.office365.com/ecp or its new version https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/.

The ladder both at least did let me in from time to time - browser and computer independent.. .even on Linux I was rejected or not... absolutely erratic. Same with the user experience URIs, which did work - same browsers as with my Windows device - at least under Linux.

I tried much of the things, the web was willing to offer by searching it and was close to give up. I even did turn off all security measurements and started the good old Wireshark but nothing really led me to the solution - which I will not further keep away from you :)

A Solution

When I did setup O365 I was not happy by just adding some roles to my account, I just added all roles - why not, for setup I didn't want to fall short nor wanted to be the Global Administrator before establishing MFA.

I than found 

We have a similar issue where user may receive redirect error when trying to sign in Outlook. The potential cause is: When there are too many roles that the user belongs to, the size of JWT token is bigger than 4K. OWA reuses JWT token data for OpenId Connect authentication. Because of the JWT size, the overall cookie length exceeds 4K, some browsers may not set the cookie.

 

For this case, please kindly confirm with your admin, try to sign in Office 365 admin center to checking all roles you already own and remove the un-needed roles. If you’re Office 365 global admin, in admin center, check current roles assigned to you and unassign all the other admin roles in the M365 admin center. Wait for a while for changes to take effect and test issue again.

at Microsoft Answers: Repeating redirects detected. Scroll down, I here cited the last answer above already, however, you might want to thank Anna Ma MSFT for this solution, if this helps you to overcome the here described issue - I did so and herewith again: 

Thank you Anna Ma MSFT.

 

Aftermath

Despite the fact that Microsoft Exchange Online Team might want to expand the error message to e.g. "Cookie not found" or something like that and not the five or six different, misleading error messages, I again found a point speaking against Cookies - modern browsers do deliver alternative solutions; and here I don't need to write about GDPR compliance or related stuff.

Nearly 20 years ago I showed in a quite complex Netscape & Internet Explorer supporting JavaScript Web-project - nowadays you would use one of these nice frameworks - with a quite challenging interface (the designer was allowed what he believed is cool, modern, ...) that Cookies are of no use (at that time). We stored data up to 10MB and more by using other ways (which does work differently still today). Which was ridiculous too - but that's another story.

2008-07-23

Mac OS X & Windows... "two" worlds ? Issue #1 of ~

Today's issue: Mac and Windows: The randomly missing SPACE

Hallo everybody,

this is the first issue, so before I start writing please allow a short foreword:

The consulting I am currently doing get's me into the wonderful situation to sit between all seats in terms of the IT environment. So I thought it is time to start occasionally Issues about interoperability between Apple Mac OS 7 - X and Microsoft Windows 2000 - Vista and Linux diverse distributions and UNIX diverse variations at all - but mainly I am very sure you will read stuff about Apples and Microsofts OS'es :-)

I promise - even though I consider myself more "in love" with Windows - to be as neutral as possible. If something is wrong on the one or other side, I am happy to correct it.

Note Users of both sides tend to be polemic and fundamental the moment you are talking about 'their' OS - since this is a moderated blog, everything I believe is a polemic, fundamental or whatever and does not help forward to overcome the issues etc. will not be published. So please think twice before you start posting.

Now the issue: The randomly missing SPACE

Prologue
We got an interesting lead - thanks again Jörg - and I started to write the offer on my Windows PC with Office 2007, after some hours I finally felt like I entered the road to victory - the last thing was to have someone doing the editorial and of course the proofreading. As you know, after several hours working on the same doc, four eyes see more than two. My counterpart for this was a Mac OS X user with Office 2008 for Mac. After some forth and back changes us decided that's the offer to go. Great so far...

Two days later we got the information that the management of the company we offered our services declined the offer and to work with us - simply because they felt like we just delivered a sleazy made offer to them.

What happened?
Thunderstrucked by lightning we wondered what they mean. And "of course" they didn't give us the slightest hint. Re-reading our offer, we figured out that we lost several spaces so their feelings definitely were not about the numbers we were offering to them.

After some investigation we found the issue: Mac OS X & obviously many programs running on it do have several interoperability problems with SPACES. Even though this is nothing real dramatic since other systems despite of their age did and do have similar issues, here the issue is quite annoying - especially since I didn't get the chance to discuss the offer and of course didn't get the contract as well.

It also looks like this issue is not only limited to one version of OS X, up until today, 2008-07-23, all versions / updates of OS X do report similar issues - even though I found only one posting in the macrumors forum that is in relation to Word 2008. I described the issue more detailed at my answer of this post. The thread can be found at http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=5886400.

Solution
Not a solution, a work-around: As of today we simply changed our processes in the hope sooner or lattle Apple or Microsoft get's the problem solved. Our process enhancement simply forces everybody to do proof-reading of the entire document before it leaves the company or is stored as final.

Important

Due to the fact that Mac users won't see the problem at all when printing the doc or reading it on their screen, they should save a PDF Version of the doc and proof-read here, this seems the only way to pin the issue down - or, give it to a 'Windows" colleague to open and save it on his machine and proof-read afterwards.

I am looking forward to get more stories or feedback on this one,

Sincerly,

Ingo-Stefan Schilling