Multiple Office 365 profiles on a shared PC & Security

Multiple Office 365 profiles on a shared PC

I had a client that I replaced their PC and upgraded them to a new one with an Office 365 version of Outlook 2013. There is about 5 of them and they all share one PC and they all have separate email accounts that they open via separate Outlook profiles.

So like normal I setup each user as their own profile and set it to Prompt for a profile to be used.

The first issue was that the users would all click on save my password. That would then enabled every user to open any users emails and read/do whatever they wanted. This obviously wasn’t a good thing. The first fix was to open each profile Properties –> E-mail Accounts –> Data Files Tab –> Settings –> Security Tab and turn on Always prompt for logon credentials under User identification.

While this now forced them to authenticate each time this was only for NEW emails, so if they hit cancel on the password prompt or even just let Outlook load it would still open their email accounts for any user to view. This is because of Office 365 and Exchange and how it caches emails locally to a OST file. If you were using a PST you could then put a password on your data file in the same settings box in the Data Files tab. OST files do not let you do this. The fix I used for this was to then go into everyone’s profile again and set their accounts to not Use Cached Exchange Mode. Properties –> E-mail Accounts –> Change –> Unclick Use Cached Exchange Mode.

Now if they don’t enter a password Outlook cant open because it is no longer cached and they cant all read each others email. They are not heavy Outlook users so they wont notice the hit and feature loss from not being in cached mode. Ideally I could also create separate windows profiles for each user, but they didn’t want that so this was the best option.