Sharepoint Designer 2013 authentication problems

Question

My company uses O365 SharePoint sites that I would like to be able to edit using SharePoint Designer 2013, however I am experiencing some problems making it work. I open SharePoint Designer 2013 and I go to Account and click on Add a service, then storage and select the option for Office 365 SharePoint. I am then asked for my email address, which I provide. The next screen asks for my password, which again I provide. Once that is done I see that 2 services are added, OneDrive - My company name and Sites - My company name. Both these entries state that to connect I'll need to provide my user name and password. So I click on the connect button and it brings up a sign in window, already populated with my email address as the user ID. When I enter the password and click Sign in it fails with a pop up error message saying "The username or password for Sites - My company name isn't correct. Please try again"

I know the password is correct, and I'm not the only user experiencing this exact same problem. Can anyone explain why this would be and how to fix it?

Answer 1

I don't have an answer for that authentication issue, but for general info, SP Designer 13 is going to be the last iteration of Designer. The objective is to migrate to using Forms and PowerApps for some of what you could do with SPD and Infopath, and modern web part editing/config for design needs. This can be done now in O365/SP Online.

Answer 2

I believe that the authentication problem has to do with Designer not fully supporting Multi-factor Authentication. Web searches turn up some people saying it should, and others saying it doesn't. It seems to work sometimes and not others, and seems to throw this error most often when using the "new sign-in experience" that O365 has been trying to roll out for months.

If you're reading this and you know that your organization has MFA enabled for your user account, then you could try creating an App Password for SharePoint Designer 2013. Or if you're really good friends with the Global Admins, you could ask them to disable MFA on your account at least temporarily to prove to them and Microsoft that it's an MFA issue.

Here's an article that explains how and why to create an App Password in O365. In our environment using the App Passwork method seems to have been successful but we don't have that many people using SPD2013.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/multi-factor-authentication/end-user/multi-factor-authentication-end-user-app-passwords

Answer 3

I had a very similar problem and it got solved when I first logged our (sharepoint) intranet with IE and not with my usual browser (Chrome or Edge). After logging with IE I started again SPD and it did not ask any authentication. Previously I had used all possible "fix" (cache clearing, patch, reinstall, new password etc etc).