Microsoft Edge and Enterprise State Roaming

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This article explains how Microsoft Edge participation in the Enterprise State Roaming (ESR) offering is changing to better support sync across platforms and devices.

Introduction

With Windows 10, Microsoft Entra ID users gained the ability to securely synchronize their user settings and application settings data to the cloud. Enterprise State Roaming (ESR) provides users with a unified experience across their Windows devices and reduces the time needed for configuring a new device.

As a result of Microsoft Edge adopting the Chromium platform, its sync solution is now disconnected from Windows sync framework. This disconnect affects the relationship of Microsoft Edge to the ESR offering.

Important

Microsoft Edge does not participate in the ESR offering.

What's changing with Microsoft Edge?

With Microsoft Edge, the sync solution isn't tied to the Windows sync ecosystem. This sync solution lets us offer Microsoft Edge across all the platforms, such as Windows 7, Windows 8.1, iOS, Android and macOS. We're also able to offer sync for non-primary accounts on Windows. In addition, we can ship Microsoft Edge at a more frequent and flexible release cadence than Windows. (For more information, see Windows updates to support the next version of Microsoft Edge. All these factors highlighted the need to reassess Microsoft Edge participation in the ESR offering.

ESR is framed as a Windows product offering with promises about how data from Windows devices is handled, but Microsoft Edge sync will extend this functionality beyond Windows devices. Because the data roams across these devices, it makes it difficult to define the Microsoft Edge sync offering in the context of ESR. To simplify how sync works and is managed, and to accommodate the changes that are highlighted, a decision was made to pull Microsoft Edge out of the ESR offering.

Does this mean that Enterprises will lose the abilities they had as part of ESR?

No. Microsoft Edge will continue to support most of the abilities provided in the ESR offering.

Unified experience across devices and new device configuration time

When a user is signed into their windows device with a Microsoft Entra account, Microsoft Edge will implicitly inherit that Identity on first launch of the new browser.

After a user has explicitly consented to turn on sync in Microsoft Edge, the browser will sync all the browser data, such as favorites, passwords, and history. Sync ensures a unified experience across devices and reduces the time needed to personalize the browser.

Separation of corporate and consumer data

Organizations are in control of their data, and there's no mixing of corporate data in a consumer cloud account or consumer data in an enterprise cloud account.

Enhanced security

Data is automatically encrypted before leaving the user's Windows 10 device by using Azure Information Protection, and data stays encrypted at rest in the cloud. All content stays encrypted at rest in the cloud, except for the namespaces, like settings names.

Monitoring

We'll provide control and visibility over who syncs settings in your organization and on which devices through integration with the Microsoft Entra admin center. This capability will be enabled in a future release.

Management

Admins will be able to control which members in your organization can enable sync. See Use Azure Information Protection to configure Microsoft Edge sync and Sync group policies. Additionally, users can turn sync on/off for each of their devices and toggle each data attribute individually for sync.

Key management

The synchronization feature uses Azure Information Protection (AIP) to protect the synchronized data for only the user and the enterprise admins. AIP supports Microsoft managed keys (default) and bring your own key for cloud-key management. The cloud-key management strategy your organization uses is transparent to Microsoft Edge and has no impact on the synchronization feature.

Important

Hold your own key (HYOK) and the Active Directory Rights Management Service aren't supported.

Summary of sync attributes

The following data attributes will sync in the new version of Microsoft Edge at first launch:

  • Favorites
  • Passwords
  • Addresses and more (form-fill)
  • Collections
  • Settings
  • Extensions
  • Open tabs (available in Microsoft Edge version 88 or later)
  • History (available in Microsoft Edge version 88 or later)

The preceding list of attributes is different than the attributes that could be synced in Microsoft Edge Legacy. (For details about Microsoft Edge Legacy settings, see Windows 10 roaming settings.) Users can selectively enable/disable these attributes using Microsoft Edge settings. Given the difference in attributes between the two versions (for example, history), users might be asked to give sync consent again.

Note

Unlike Microsoft Edge Legacy, Microsoft Edge doesn't use Windows credential Manager for passwords and as a result, won't sync passwords with Internet Explorer or other apps that use Windows Credential manager.

Terms of service

Terms of service for Microsoft Edge sync fall under the Microsoft software license viewable in Microsoft Edge at edge://terms.

See also