Great news for users of Office 365 Multi Factor Authentication! Office 365 MFA is soon to be fully supported in the Office 2013 Windows client applications.

At the moment, MFA only supports web based applications like OWA. If you have MFA enabled and want to use rich client applications such as Outlook 2013, you have to use an App Password. This is a randomly generated 16 digit persistent passcode which is assigned to an individual application, such as Word 2013.This provides a higher level of security than a user specified password however is not as secure as true MFA.

This new functionality will pave the way for customers making use of the integrated Office 365 MFA authentication. Especially considering that it is totally free to enable!

Currently the update is only available to those people taking part in a Private Preview, however interested parties can keep their eyes on the Office 365 roadmap at http://roadmap.office.com to find out about release dates for this update.