Before the migration to the new Kolab Now environment, users had to give their login credentials twice to get into the Kolab webmail client. First at https://kolabnow.com/login and later after pressing the Webmail button. You could also make use of the direct URL https://kolabnow.com/apps – in all instances the credentials would be validated against the same LDAP internally.
Many users found that a cumbersome procedure, and the number of support tickets suggesting to do a more modern authentication was high. The Kolab team took a little time to evaluate such solutions.
SSO was finally implemented in the latest new environment. With the new SSO solution, the Webmail client can use an OAuth token instead of credentials, further improving security.
The new SSO authentication system is created and run by the Kolab Now team using the standard OIDC protocol. It is only the cockpit and the Webmail client authenticating against this SSO. No 3’rd party provider is involved. Access from external clients is separate from the SSO authentication.
We had expected from the previous user feedback, that this would be received well. However, it turned out, that many users were not found of, or for one or the other reason unable to use, SSO.
Hence we have made a change:
