Office 365 SharePoint Agent Credential Failure

 Problem

Your SharePoint Agent is pointing to SharePoint Online and the agent fails with the following error message:

[500] Could not execute the specified command: Unrecognized response when getting SharePoint online security cookies, please check your credentials.

 Solution

SharePoint Agent uses basic authentication for SharePoint Online. It does not support multifactor authentication, modern authentication or ADFS authentican. When using the SharePoint Agent with Office 365, the user used for authentication must satisfy the following conditions:

• User must not authenticate with ADFS or modern authentication. Create a user for the SP agent directly in Office 365 so that ADFS is not used.

• If Conditional Access policy is enabled in Office 365, exclude the user from said policy.

Depending on your Office 365 setup, you can also set an app password for the account and use it in the SharePoint Agent. Please see Manage app passwords for two-step verification (microsoft.com) for details.

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