This article focuses on Office 365 password policy.
Allowed Characters
Following are the allowed characters in Office 365 user password:
- a - z
- A - Z
- 0 - 9
- @ # $ % ^ & * – _ + = [ ] { } | \ : ‘ , . ? / ` ~ “ < > ( ) ;
Disallowed Characters
Following are disallowed characters in Office 365 user password:
- Unicode characters like !, ¥, Ą, Ə, ɖ, o̕, Љ, Ԁ, Ա, ؟, ܀, ހ, ߄ etc
- spaces
Office 365 User Password
Office 365 password must contain minimum 8 characters and maximum 16 characters and cannot contain a user name. It requires 3 out of 4 the following:
- Lowercase characters
- Uppercase characters
- Numbers (0 - 9)
- Symbols like @ # $ % ^ & * – _ + = [ ] { } | \ : ‘ , . ? / ` ~ “ < > ( ) ;
Rules
Following are some of the rules applied to Office 365 user password:
- Password history - Last password cannot be used again
- Password expiry notification - Default value is 14 days (User is informed before 14 days about the password expiration)
- Password expiry duration - Default value is 90 days (Password is expired and user needs to set a new password)
- Password history duration - Forever
- Account lockout - After 10 unsuccessful attempts of entering wrong password, the user needs to solve the CAPTCHA dialog
Examples
Following are the valid password examples:
- Summer2015
- @may2016
- @Summerset
Following are invalid password examples:
- Summer
- summer2015
- May 2015