Using Google Identity to sign into your Mac

There are many ways you can log into your macOS device. You can use the traditional login screen, where you enter your password. You can use a Single Sign-On tool, such as JumpCloud or Okta to have the same password as other systems allowing a "single" sign-on. Or you can use Google or Active Directory Identity as your sign-in.

Since many of our customers are using Google for their email, and Google sign-in for other systems, such as Slack, we have rolled out Google Identity. With Google Identity, you log into your computer with your company google email.

On the first sign in, you will be prompted to approve permissions

Then you will be asked to either Select an account or create a new one. If you already have an existing account on the computer, choose the User from the dropdown called "Select user to sync data" and enter in the password. If you are a new user and don't already have an account, click "Create a new account".

Once you are signed in, continue to use your computer as you would.

A nice feature of using Google Identity is that you can enforce 2-factor authentication (2FA) even on the login, something that macOS does not have. By having 2FA enforced on your domain, users will be required to use that even when signing into the computer.

Troubleshooting

If for some reason you are offline when the Google Identity window loads you will see a window similar to this:

If that happens - there is a button that looks like three dots inside a circle (...). Click on that and either select a Wifi network to join or choose "Revert to macOS Login Window". Doing that will pull up the old login window you have been used to all this time.

NOTE: Virtua Computers has noticed that if you use the "Rever to macOS login window", sometimes the users' original computer password (prior to the Google Identity upgrade) is the password that's needed to unlock the computer.  At this time we haven't found a reason for this, nor a way to tell if your computer does this or not.