This article provides a summary of the agenda and reports pack for the Licensing Regulatory Committee meeting scheduled on 14 August 2025. The meeting was scheduled to discuss a user guide for Entra ID External Authentication in Modern.Gov. The next meeting date for the zzTestHubCommittee was to be confirmed.

Entra ID External Authentication: User Guide

The committee was scheduled to review a user guide for Entra ID External Authentication within the Modern.Gov platform. The guide, authored by Lorraine Clarke from the Development and Testing Team, Modern.Gov, and approved by Ben Parker, covered implementation, system configuration, and user configuration requirements.

The guide explained how to configure the Modern.Gov system to enable external authentication, potentially requiring additional work from the council's infrastructure team. It noted that user configuration must include an External Authentication Account for integration with external authentication. The guide stated that:

External Authentication Accounts for existing users will be added as part of the implementation process. Following implementation, External Authentication Accounts will need to be added manually for new external authentication users.

The guide also detailed how to set a random database password for newly created Issue Manager accounts, a necessary step for single sign-on functionality. It cautioned against using special characters like $ % ' " # £ and @ when setting passwords within Issue Manager.

The guide further explained how to enable single sign-on for users by navigating to Configure | Users | (select the user) Edit | External Authentication tab, and adding an external authentication account.

The guide included instructions for logging into Issue Manager and the Intranet/Extranet using external authentication, including screenshots of the login screens. It also described the auto-enrolment process for automatically adding users to the Modern.Gov database when they log in on the Intranet or Extranet for the first time. The guide noted that auto-enrolment should be timeboxed for the initial onboarding process due to security implications.

The guide also explained how to create an external authentication record, including the user's email address, and how this leads to the automatic creation of a record in the Issue Manager database with the role of Officer.