Office 365 SSO - Using smart links or IdP initiated authentication with Office 365

There is a good wiki page explaining how to set smart links. I followed the same, and was still getting error after redirecting to Office 365. After debugging, I figured out what was going wrong.

As per the wiki page, we need to remove QS parameter “bk”. However, I had to remove one more QS parameter “ct” similar to “bk”. I tried to access the service through the normal way at two different times and traced the requests and figured out what was different at both times. Both times, I found values for “bk” and “ct” to be different. So this means that we need to remove these from the smart link.

If you are programmatically trying to generate the URL, then you should be able to even set the value of the QS parameters dynamically. I think the value is total seconds since 1/1/1970. I haven’t tried out this myself yet. So please use this with caution. C# code snippet which could help in this situation is given below.

TimeSpan t = (DateTime.UtcNow - new DateTime(1970, 1, 1));
int timestamp = (int) t.TotalSeconds;
Console.WriteLine(timestamp);