In the past few months I have encountered authentication issues while trying to use the Microsoft Office Add-in for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance for the customer I am currently working for.
The Microsoft Office Add-In enables you to receive data from the application, edit, enrich and then publish it back into Dynamics 365 Finance. This can be very helpful in situations where you want to process lots of records, which can be time consuming if you want to do this within the application.
Scenario
If you want to open data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations in Excel you can use the Microsoft Office Add-in. In order to connect with the right environment you will have to enter the server URL first and then click OK to connect. This is where the authentication error can occur.
Error message:
Authentication error.
Details:
Unable to sign in as (user information). Please see the message center for details.
Message center details:
Token renewal operation failed due to timeout
Solution
Although there isn’t any formal cause stated by Microsoft, they have informed me that the product group is working on a solution that is planned to be released in Platform update 31. Besides that there will be an update available for the Microsoft Office Add-in by the end of October 2019.
Platform update 31 is expected to be available with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance version 10.0.7 but it has not yet been formally announced. The latest version is 10.0.6 with a release planned for November 2019.
Workaround
With a permanent solution ahead we have a workaround available. Please keep in mind that sometimes you will have to follow up this workaround a view times in order to successfully log in.