Our trusted communities help members to learn together, provide peer-to-peer support, and empower them to make informed decisions. It’s important that we keep providing a safe space to convene community conversations and for you to share resources. To maintain these community spaces, we have decided to enable multifactor authentication (MFA) for all shared Teams spaces provided by Jisc.

What MFA means for community members

All users of Jisc Teams community spaces will be required to authenticate their account to be able to continue using the spaces.

The first time you log into a Jisc hosted Teams site, once MFA has been enabled, you will be prompted to authenticate by either by installing an app onto a mobile phone, adding Jisc as a new account to your existing authenticator app, or via a browser. If you do not have time to do this during that first log-on, you will be able to put it off for up to 14-days

Once authenticated you should not be asked to authenticate again unless something changes or is flagged with your account.

By making this change we can keep providing these important community spaces. Thank you for your help with maintaining a safe space for your community to meet and learn together.

When will this happen

We will begin switching on MFA from May 2023 and hope to have all spaces switched over by June. Each Teams community space will be switched on to a schedule determined with the community facilitator, who will put messages out to the community to let you know when this will happen.

More guidance

The prompts will guide you through the process to authenticate your account. Here is a step-by-step of what this should look like on your primary device, you will also have a secondary device (most likely a mobile phone) with your authentication app or a browser app to provide the authentication. The following example is for if you are using the Microsoft authenticator app on your second device.

You will download the Microsoft Authenticator app and open it on your mobile or other secondary device – you may already be using this for your work access.

Note the option ‘I want to set up a different method’ is available for if you do not want to use the Microsoft Authenticator app. This might be because you are used to using a different recommended authenticator or you do not wish to use your mobile phone for this purpose.

For a browser based authenticator, we recommend https://authenticator.cc/ (Quick start guide: https://authenticator.cc/docs/en/quickstart)

Please scan your unique QR code using your mobile phone camera, or the browser plug-in if you have opted for a browser based authentication.

Approve via the app.

You’re done and ready to keep using the community space as usual.

Accessing support

We expect this change to happen smoothly. Many of you are likely to already have MFA in place at work, so this will likely just be adding another account to your existing MFA app or other provision. However, if you do have difficulty, support is available by contacting the Jisc OneDesk on 02829 33 1111 or servicedesk@jisc.ac.uk (please note that this is not the same support desk as for other Jisc products, and should only be used for access issues into Jisc Teams Community spaces).

---

Get involved with communities

Photo by Dominika Roseclay via Pexels