If you’ve ever been kicked out of NetDocuments in the middle of your workday and had to log back in, you already know how disruptive it can be. But what you might not know is that how you log in to NetDocuments has significant implications for your firm’s security — and your sanity. Let’s talk about session timeouts, single sign-on, and why connecting NetDocuments to Microsoft is one of the smartest moves a law firm can make.
The Login Experience Without Single Sign-On
If your firm is not using single sign-on (SSO), NetDocuments will log you out automatically after approximately 90 minutes of inactivity. When that happens, you’ll need to re-enter your NetDocuments username and password to get back in.
Some users report that the timeout feels shorter in practice, and experiences can vary. But the bottom line is that without SSO, your session has a relatively short leash — which means repeated interruptions throughout the day for attorneys and staff who are juggling multiple matters at once.
The Login Experience With Single Sign-On via Microsoft
When your firm enables single sign-on through Microsoft, the experience changes dramatically. Your NetDocuments session lasts 8 hours — a full workday. And here’s the part that surprises most people: when your session does expire, you don’t have to enter a password. You simply hit refresh in your browser, and you’re logged back in immediately. Microsoft handles the authentication behind the scenes, and the whole process is seamless.
For busy law firms, that difference is significant. Fewer interruptions mean less frustration and more time spent on actual work.
What Is Single Sign-On, and Why Does It Matter?
Single sign-on is a method of authentication that allows users to log in once — through a central identity provider, in this case Microsoft — and gain access to multiple applications without logging in to each one separately. When a firm enables SSO with NetDocuments via Microsoft, your Microsoft credentials (the same ones you use for Outlook, Teams, and everything else in your Microsoft 365 environment) become your NetDocuments credentials.
You’re not creating or managing a separate NetDocuments username and password. You’re simply extending your existing Microsoft identity to NetDocuments.
Why Authenticating Through Microsoft Is More Secure
This is where SSO goes from being a convenience feature to a genuine security upgrade.
When firms manage logins directly in NetDocuments, they’re responsible for enforcing password policies, managing two-factor authentication, and handling user access on two separate platforms. In practice, that rarely goes as smoothly as it should. Password requirements may differ, 2FA may be optional or inconsistently enforced, and it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks.
When you authenticate through Microsoft, all of that security management moves into Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), where your IT team or managed services provider already has control. That means:
Two-factor authentication is enforced consistently through Microsoft for every user, with no separate setup required in NetDocuments.
Password requirements — complexity, expiration, history — are all managed in one place, using the same policies that govern every other application in your Microsoft environment.
Conditional access policies can be applied, such as blocking logins from unrecognized devices or locations, entirely outside of NetDocuments.
Centralized security oversight means your IT team has one dashboard to monitor and manage access, rather than two.
In short, you’re leveraging Microsoft’s enterprise-grade identity infrastructure instead of relying on a separate set of credentials that may not be held to the same standards.
The Offboarding Problem — and Why SSO Solves It
Here’s a scenario that plays out at law firms every week: an employee leaves. The firm disables its Microsoft account on its last day. But nobody thinks to remove them from NetDocuments.
Based on our experience across hundreds of implementations, firms disable a departing user’s Microsoft access nearly 100% of the time. They remove the same user from NetDocuments far less reliably — often because it requires a separate step that gets overlooked in the chaos of someone’s departure.
Without SSO, that gap is a real security risk. A former employee with an active NetDocuments account could potentially still access your firm’s documents.
With SSO, that gap closes automatically. Because the user must authenticate through Microsoft to reach NetDocuments, disabling their Microsoft account immediately and completely blocks their access to NetDocuments — even if no one ever touches their NetDocuments user profile. One action, total lockout. No second step required.
The Bottom Line
Single sign-on with Microsoft isn’t just a nice-to-have feature — it’s a meaningful security improvement that also makes daily life easier for your users. Longer sessions, seamless re-authentication, centralized security enforcement, and automatic offboarding protection all come from a single configuration change.
If your firm is still managing NetDocuments logins separately from your Microsoft environment, it’s worth discussing whether SSO makes sense for you. In most cases, it does.
Have questions about setting up single sign-on for your NetDocuments environment? Contact Optiable — we’ve helped hundreds of law firms make this transition smoothly.