title: using a third party identity provider with Office 365
body: <p>we are currently using an inhouse SSO solution, using 2-factor authentication, that generates SAML to allow SSO to google apps and salesforce. We are looking to allow support for Office 365.</p>
  
  <p>I am looking at all the documentation for Office 365 and from what i see, it uses SAML, but only if provided by an ADFS.</p>
  
  <p>Would it be possible to use Office 365 with a pure SAML solution?
  Or is it possible to use ADFS with another identity provider (so not an Active Directory).</p>
  
  <p>I have seen a sample with Tivoli IP, but i do not quite understand the roles, if I understand it all correctly, it actually defers the actual authentication from ADFS to Tivoli, but is that correct? If that would be true, that would be nice :)</p>
  
  <p>Aside of that, from my google-expedition I can see the following options to use our own SSO solution with Office 365:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>adapt the login page from ADFS (aspx) and add our 2fa solution there. (<a href="http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/sso/294.aspx" rel="nofollow">source</a>)</li>
  <li>use Forefront UAG, but not sure what that exactly means (<a href="http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/sso/294.aspx" rel="nofollow">source</a>)</li>
  <li>use a service that pretends to behave as ADFS (<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/plankytronixx/archive/2011/01/25/whiteboard-video-how-adfs-and-the-microsoft-federation-gateway-work-together-up-in-the-office-365-cloud.aspx" rel="nofollow">source</a> --in the comments)</li>
  <li>use SAML to federate the authentication (if I understand correctly) (<a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg749921%28WS.10%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">source</a>)</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>From 3. i would conclude that 4. is not possible, but is that just old information and now no longer valid?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you for any helpful insights :)</p>