Implementing Single Sign-On (SSO) for M-Files with Azure Entra ID delivers significant advantages for modern organizations. Entra ID provides a centralized and secure identity management platform, enabling users to access M-Files seamlessly with their corporate credentials. This integration not only streamlines user onboarding and reduces password fatigue, but also strengthens security posture through advanced authentication and access policies. With Entra ID, IT teams benefit from simplified administration, comprehensive audit trails, and enhanced compliance support empowering organizations to manage access efficiently while meeting regulatory requirements. TEAM IM has extensive experience assisting customers with planning for, transitioning to, and configuring federated authentication with M-Files.
Before proceeding with the following steps, confirm that your M-Files environment is connected to M-Files Manage. This article assumes the M-Files system already has numerous users authenticating using regular M-Files user accounts with passwords managed by the M-Files system. We strongly advise having end users test this configuration in a development or test environment before deploying to production to validate functionality and familiarize users with the process. Additionally, ensure you have access to an M-Files managed administrator account to prevent the risk of being locked out of your vault. Overall there are two systems that need to be configured to facilitate SSO: User Synchronization and Authentication. User Synchronization involves importing Entra ID users into M-Files; Authentication verifies user credentials and ensures accounts exist in the M-Files vault.
User Synchronization involves importing users residing in Entra ID in to M-Files Manage. The full steps for this can be found in M-Files Manage documentation in Managing User Groups with User Provisioning. The first step is Configuring User Provisioning in M-Files Manage. This creates an application in Manage which provides a set of configurations used to configure an Entra ID app. The next step is configuring an Entra ID app with access to your Entra ID tenant which synchronizes users to M-Files Manage using the SCIM protocol. Once this is complete, users will start showing up in M-Files Manage.
It can be tempting to add users to the vault at this point. However, this means users imported in this manner will be treated as new accounts, resulting in the loss of personalized settings such as pinned items and custom views. This also disconnects users from objects they've checked in or made changes to. Information on re-configuring existing users can be found further down this article.
Prior to assigning login accounts to vaults, authentication must be configured. There are a few ways to configure Federated Authentication in M-Files. By default, vaults created in the cloud are configured with M-Files login service which seamlessly works with Entra ID. This can also be manually configured in existing vaults. If you'd like more control, it's also possible to configure M-Files to authenticate against Entra ID using an app maintained in your own tenant.
Once authentication is in place, you can transition users to sign in with their Entra ID credentials instead of their existing M-Files accounts. To accomplish this, log into each M-Files vault, navigate to the Users section, and for each user currently configured with an M-Files login, double-click the user and update their Login account to use the corresponding Entra ID login. This is feasible for smaller vaults however, in vaults with hundreds if not thousands of users, this can be prohibitively tedious and error prone. TEAM IM has run through this process with numerous customers and has put together an automated solution, please feel free to reach out to learn more!
Migrating M-Files authentication to Azure Entra ID SSO represents a strategic investment in security, operational efficiency, and user experience. By following the user synchronization and authentication steps outlined above, organizations can ensure a robust and compliant identity management framework while significantly reducing administrative overhead. Although manual user migration is possible, leveraging automation through expert assistance can help manage complexity, especially for large environments. Embracing SSO with Entra ID positions your enterprise for scalable, secure access management—now and in the future.