Enable SSO in an Office Add-in using nested app authentication

Article
11/05/2024

You can use the MSAL.js library with nested app authentication to use SSO from your Office Add-in. Using nested app authentication offers several advantages over the On-Behalf-Of (OBO) flow.

You only need to use the MSAL.js library and don’t need the getAccessToken function in Office.js.
You can call services such as Microsoft Graph with an access token from your client code as an SPA. There’s no need for a middle-tier server.
You can use incremental and dynamic consent for scopes.
You don't need to preauthorize your hosts (for example, Teams, Office) to call your endpoints.

NAA supported accounts and hosts

NAA supports both Microsoft Accounts and Microsoft Entra ID (work/school) identities. It doesn't support Azure Active Directory B2C for business-to-consumer identity management scenarios. The following table explains the current support by platform. Platforms listed as generally available (GA) are ready for production usage in your add-in.

Application	Web	Windows	Mac	iOS/iPad	Android
Excel	In preview	In preview	In preview	In preview on iPad	Not applicable
Outlook	GA	GA in Current Channel, Preview in all other channels	GA	GA (iOS)	GA
PowerPoint	In preview	In preview	In preview	In preview on iPad	Not applicable
Word	In preview	In preview	In preview	In preview on iPad	Not applicable

Important

To use NAA on platforms that are still in preview, join the Microsoft 365 Insider Program (https://insider.microsoft365.com/join) and choose Current Channel (Preview). Don't use NAA in production add-ins for any preview platforms. We invite you to try out NAA in test or development environments and welcome feedback on your experience through GitHub (see the Feedback section at the end of this page).

Register your single-page application

You’ll need to create a Microsoft Azure App registration for your add-in on the Azure portal. The app registration must have at minimum:

A name
A supported account type
An SPA redirect

If your add-in requires additional app registration beyond NAA and SSO, see Single-page application: App registration.

Add a trusted broker through SPA redirect

To enable NAA, your app registration must include a specific redirect URI to indicate to the Microsoft identity platform that your add-in allows itself to be brokered by supported hosts. The redirect URI of the application must be of type Single Page Application and conform to the following scheme.

brk-multihub://your-add-in-domain

For example if you were testing your add-in on port 3000 on the localhost server, you would use brk-multihub://localhost:3000 as the redirect value.

Trusted broker groups are dynamic by design and can be updated in the future to include additional hosts where your add-in may use NAA flows. Currently the brk-multihub group includes Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams (for when Office is activated inside).

Configure MSAL config to use NAA

Configure your add-in to use NAA by calling the createNestablePublicClientApplication function in MSAL. MSAL returns a public client application that can be nested in a native application host (for example, Outlook) to acquire tokens for your application.

The following steps show how to enable NAA in the taskpane.js or taskpane.ts file in a project built with yo office (Office Add-in Task Pane project).

Add the @azure/msal-browser package to the dependencies section of the package.json file for your project. For more information on this package, see Microsoft Authentication Library for JavaScript (MSAL.js) for Browser-Based Single-Page Applications. We recommend using the latest version of the package (at time of the last article update it was 3.26.0).
```
"dependencies": {
    "@azure/msal-browser": "^3.26.0",
    ...
```
Save and run npm install to install @azure/msal-browser.
Add the following code to the top of the taskpane.js or taskpane.ts file. This will import the MSAL browser library.
```
import { createNestablePublicClientApplication } from "@azure/msal-browser";
```

Initialize the public client application

Next, you need to initialize MSAL and get an instance of the public client application. This is used to get access tokens when needed. We recommend that you put the code that creates the public client application in the Office.onReady method.

In your Office.onReady function, add a call to createNestablePublicClientApplication as shown below. Replace the Enter_the_Application_Id_Here placeholder with the Azure app ID you saved previously.

let pca = undefined;
Office.onReady(async (info) => {
  if (info.host) {
    document.getElementById("sideload-msg").style.display = "none";
    document.getElementById("app-body").style.display = "flex";
    document.getElementById("run").onclick = run;

    // Initialize the public client application
    pca = await createNestablePublicClientApplication({
      auth: {
        clientId: "Enter_the_Application_Id_Here",
        authority: "https://login.microsoftonline.com/common"
      },
    });
  }
});

Note

The previous code sample sets the authority to common, which supports work and school accounts or personal Microsoft accounts. If you want to configure a single tenant or other account types, see Application configuration options for additional authority options.

Acquire your first token

The tokens acquired by MSAL.js via NAA will be issued for your Azure app registration ID. In this code sample, you acquire a token for the Microsoft Graph API. If the user has an active session with Microsoft Entra ID the token is acquired silently. If not, the library prompts the user to sign in interactively. The token is then used to call the Microsoft Graph API.

The following steps show the pattern to use for acquiring a token.

Specify your scopes. NAA supports incremental and dynamic consent so always request the minimum scopes needed for your code to complete its task.
Call acquireTokenSilent. This will get the token without requiring user interaction.
If acquireTokenSilent fails, call acquireTokenPopup to display an interactive dialog for the user. acquireTokenSilent can fail if the token expired, or the user has not yet consented to all of the requested scopes.

The following code shows how to implement this authentication pattern in your own project.

Replace the run function in taskpane.js or taskpane.ts with the following code. The code specifies the minimum scopes needed to read the user's files.

async function run() {
// Specify minimum scopes needed for the access token.
const tokenRequest = {
  scopes: ["Files.Read", "User.Read", "openid", "profile"],
};
let accessToken = null;

// TODO 1: Call acquireTokenSilent.

// TODO 2: Call acquireTokenPopup.

// TODO 3: Log error if token still null.

// TODO 4: Call the Microsoft Graph API.

}

Replace TODO 1 with the following code. This code calls acquireTokenSilent to get the access token.

try {
  console.log("Trying to acquire token silently...");
  const userAccount = await pca.acquireTokenSilent(tokenRequest);
  console.log("Acquired token silently.");
  accessToken = userAccount.accessToken;
} catch (error) {
  console.log(`Unable to acquire token silently: ${error}`);
}

Replace TODO 2 with the following code. This code checks if the access token is acquired. If not it attempts to interactively get the access token by calling acquireTokenPopup.

if (accessToken === null) {
  // Acquire token silent failure. Send an interactive request via popup.
  try {
    console.log("Trying to acquire token interactively...");
    const userAccount = await pca.acquireTokenPopup(tokenRequest);
    console.log("Acquired token interactively.");
    accessToken = userAccount.accessToken;
  } catch (popupError) {
    // Acquire token interactive failure.
    console.log(`Unable to acquire token interactively: ${popupError}`);
  }
}

Replace TODO 3 with the following code. If both silent and interactive sign-in failed, log the error and return.

// Log error if both silent and popup requests failed.
if (accessToken === null) {
  console.error(`Unable to acquire access token.`);
  return;
}

Call an API

After acquiring the token, use it to call an API. The following example shows how to call the Microsoft Graph API by calling fetch with the token attached in the Authorization header.

Replace TODO 4 with the following code.

// Call the Microsoft Graph API with the access token.
const response = await fetch(
  `https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/drive/root/children?$select=name&$top=10`,
  {
    headers: { Authorization: accessToken },
  }
);

if (response.ok) {
  // Write file names to the console.
  const data = await response.json();
  const names = data.value.map((item) => item.name);

  // Be sure the taskpane.html has an element with Id = item-subject.
  const label = document.getElementById("item-subject");

  // Write file names to task pane and the console.
  const nameText = names.join(", ");
  if (label) label.textContent = nameText;
  console.log(nameText);
} else {
  const errorText = await response.text();
  console.error("Microsoft Graph call failed - error text: " + errorText);
}

Once all the previous code is added to the run function, be sure a button on the task pane calls the run function. Then you can sideload the add-in and try out the code.

What is nested app authentication

Nested app authentication enables SSO for applications that are nested inside of supported Microsoft applications. For example, Excel on Windows runs your add-in inside a webview. In this scenario, your add-in is a nested application running inside Excel, which is the host. NAA also supports nested apps in Teams. For example, if a Teams tab is hosting Excel, and your add-in is loaded, it is nested inside Excel, which is also nested inside Teams. Again, NAA supports this nested scenario and you can access SSO to get user identity and access tokens of the signed in user.

Best practices

We recommend the following best practices when using MSAL.js with NAA.

Use silent authentication whenever possible

MSAL.js provides the acquireTokenSilent method that handles token renewal by making silent token requests without prompting the user. The method first looks for a valid cached token. If it doesn't find one, the library makes the silent request to Microsoft Entra ID and if there's an active user session, a fresh token is returned.

In certain cases, the acquireTokenSilent method's attempt to get the token fails. Some examples of this are when there's an expired user session with Microsoft Entra ID or a password change by the user, which requires user interaction. When the acquireTokenSilent fails, you need to call the interactive acquireTokenPopup token method.

Have a fallback when NAA isn't supported

While we strive to provide a high-degree of compatibility with these flows across the Microsoft ecosystem, your add-in may be loaded in an older Office host that does not support NAA. In these cases, your add-in won't support seamless SSO and you may need to fall back to an alternate method of authenticating the user. In general you'll want to use the MSAL SPA authentication pattern with the Office JS dialog API.

Use the following code to check if NAA is supported when your add-in loads.

   Office.context.requirements.isSetSupported("NestedAppAuth", "1.1");

For more information, see the following resources.

MSAL.js APIs supported by NAA

The following table shows which APIs are supported when NAA is enabled in the MSAL config.

Method	Supported by NAA
`acquireTokenByCode`	No (throws exception)
`acquireTokenPopup`	Yes
`acquireTokenRedirect`	No (throws exception)
`acquireTokenSilent`	Yes
`addEventCallback`	Yes
`addPerformanceCallback`	No (throws exception)
`disableAccountStorageEvents`	No (throws exception)
`enableAccountStorageEvents`	No (throws exception)
`getAccountByHomeId`	Yes
`getAccountByLocalId`	Yes
`getAccountByUsername`	Yes
`getActiveAccount`	Yes
`getAllAccounts`	Yes
`getConfiguration`	Yes
`getLogger`	Yes
`getTokenCache`	No (throws exception)
`handleRedirectPromise`	No
`initialize`	Yes
`initializeWrapperLibrary`	Yes
`loginPopup`	Yes
`loginRedirect`	No (throws exception)
`logout`	No (throws exception)
`logoutPopup`	No (throws exception)
`logoutRedirect`	No (throws exception)
`removeEventCallback`	Yes
`removePerformanceCallback`	No (throws exception)
`setActiveAccount`	No
`setLogger`	Yes
`ssoSilent`	Yes

Security reporting

If you find a security issue with our libraries or services, report the issue to secure@microsoft.com with as much detail as you can provide. Your submission may be eligible for a bounty through the Microsoft Bounty program. Don't post security issues to GitHub or any other public site. We'll contact you shortly after receiving your issue report. We encourage you to get new security incident notifications by visiting Microsoft technical security notifications to subscribe to Security Advisory Alerts.

Code samples

Sample name	Description
Office Add-in with SSO using nested app authentication	Shows how to use MSAL.js nested app authentication (NAA) in an Office Add-in to access Microsoft Graph APIs for the signed-in user. The sample displays the signed-in user's name and email. It also inserts the names of files from the user's Microsoft OneDrive account into the document.
Outlook add-in with SSO using nested app authentication	Shows how to use MSAL.js nested app authentication (NAA) in an Outlook Add-in to access Microsoft Graph APIs for the signed-in user. The sample displays the signed-in user's name and email. It also inserts the names of files from the user's Microsoft OneDrive account into a new message body.

Share via