Moodle 3.3 brought a plethora of exciting new features for Moodle users around the world. One of the most exciting new features of Moodle 3.3, is the integration with online office suites and allowing your users to login with their credentials on popular social accounts.
The new feature coined as “Better Office integration” consists of 2 different features. First one will allow your users to use the new OAuth 2 support in Moodle 3.3 to Login to your Moodle site through multiple social accounts like Microsoft, Google, Facebook & Linkedin. The second one will allow you as a teacher to have access controlled links for the files from your online repositories like G-Suite or Microsoft OneDrive.
Today, I am going to show you How you can set up the Social Login link to your Moodle site. In another article, I will show you how you can get access to documents from Microsoft Office and the Google G-Suite.
Moodle 3.3 adds support for OAuth 2 services, which are used for example, to give a “Log in using Google/Microsoft/Facebook” feature on the login page, and then to share that authenticated session with repositories like Google Drive and OneDrive without having to re-authenticate. As an administrator, you can choose whether it will result in creation of new accounts in your Moodle users list. If account creation is enabled, when a user first logs in, a new account will be created. Otherwise, they will be prompted to link it to their existing account with the same email address.
To enable the OAuth2 authentication for Login:
Before enabling the OAuth 2 authentication, as an administrator you must first create the required OAuth 2 services. To create the new OAuth 2 service in Moodle, go to ‘OAuth 2 services’ in Site administration > Server and click the desired button to create a new service.
Before creating a new service, you need to have the Client ID and secret from the respective service provider. The client ID and secret are created outside of Moodle when setting up the OAuth provider. Setup instructions for popular services are mentioned in the Moodle docs pages. Check them out below
Allowing the social login to your Moodle site may result in creation of unwanted user accounts which should be avoided unless you have a valid reason for it. If you don’t want new accounts to be created when users log in with an OAuth 2 service then Go to ‘Manage authentication’ in Site administration and tick the box ‘Prevent account creation when authenticating’ (authpreventaccountcreation) and click Save Changes.
Moodle HQ Community Educator – Mary Cooch, created a video introduction to show you how you can enable the OAuth 2 login services on your Moodle site. Check it out below:
Linked Logins:
In User menu > Preferences > Linked logins, a user can link their Moodle account to an external provider (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Facebook) allowing them to use their external provider’s credentials to sign-in to Moodle.
In the next article I will show you how to connect your Google Drive and OneDrive repositories with Moodle and access the files with advanced features.
When you are upgrading your Moodle site to Moodle 3.3? Share with us in the comments section below.
