Simplifying Single Sign On for Office 365 users

There are a lot of guides for federation enabling in Office 365.

This is a good example: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj631606.aspx

But almost all of them hide from you some unpleasant true: first time users enter Office 365, they should enter their login. Or at least domain, because login page uses domain name to redirect browser to corresponding federation service.

I think it is not really convenient and fortunately, I have managed to find workaround for this.

We can specify certain url for home page in Internet Explorer via group policy. For example, we want to direct user to SharePoint host, like http://sapozhkovtest.sharepoint.com, and our upn-suffix (login domain) is sapozhkov.net. Then we need to put following url as a default page via group policy:

https://login.microsoftonline.com/?whr=sapozhkov.net&wreply=https:%2f%2fsapozhkovtest%2esharepoint%2ecom

In this case user will be automatically redirected to ADFS, then back to login page and then finally to SharePoint url.