Managing automatic switching in Microsoft Edge for Business

This week is all about Microsoft Edge for Business and the automatic switching feature. Microsoft Edge for Business is the dedicated Microsoft Edge experience that is created for work accounts. It provides IT administrators with the capabilities to provide users with a productive and secure browsing experience across managed and unmanaged devices. That includes the ability to manage the automatic switching behavior between work and personal profiles. Automatically switching between profiles can help users to keep their work and personal browsing separate. When the device has an existing work profile, it enables automatic switching when adding a personal profile, to enforce the browsing context separation. That behavior can also be managed. The automatic switching is not always desirable, or sometimes needs some tuning. This post will focus on the configuration options for automatic switching, followed with the configuration itself. This post will end with the user experience.

Note: The required settings are all available for Microsoft Edge stable release version 120 and later.

Introducing automatic switching Microsoft Edge for Business

When looking at managing automatic switching in Microsoft Edge for Business, it all starts with being familiar with the default behavior and the available configuration options. Automatic switching requires at least one work (Entra) account and one personal (MSA) account. When those are available, at this moment, automatic switching will be on by default for switching from the personal browser window to the work browser window. Automatic switching will be off by default from the work browser window to the personal browser window. This can be configured by the user. Besides that, the IT administrator has multiple controls for configuring the behavior within the organization. For this, there are multiple ADMX-backed settings available. The most important settings are available in the Identity and sign-in policies category and are briefly described in the table below.

Setting	Description
AutomaticProfileSwitchingSiteList	This setting can be used to control which profile Microsoft Edge will use to open sites in. When this setting is not configured, Microsoft Edge will continue using its heuristics to automatically switch sites.
GuidedSwitchEnabled	This setting can be used to allow Microsoft Edge to prompt the user to switch to the appropriate profile when Microsoft Edge detects that a link is personal or work.
SwitchIntranetSitesToWorkProfile	This setting can be used to allow Microsoft Edge to switch to the appropriate profile when Microsoft Edge detects that a URL is the intranet.
SwitchSitesOnIEModeSiteListToWorkProfile	This setting can be used to allow Microsoft Edge to switch to the appropriate profile when navigating to a site that matches an entry on the IE mode site list. Only sites that specify IE mode or Edge mode will be switched to the work profile.

Note: All of the described settings are ADMX-backed settings that are backed via the MSEdge.admx.

Configuring automatic switching in Microsoft Edge for Business

After being familiar with the main configuration options for automatic switching in Microsoft Edge for Business, it’s time to have a look at the configuration. The described settings for managing the automatic switching in Microsoft Edge for Business are available within the Settings Catalog in Microsoft Intune. The Settings Catalog nowadays contains the latest settings related to Microsoft Edge. The following 9 steps can be used to configure the available settings, by using Settings Catalog. As example all of those settings will be disabled, with a further description when there are more options available.

1. Open the Microsoft Intune admin center portal and navigate to Devices > Windows > Configuration profiles
2. On the Windows | Configuration profiles blade, click Create > New Policy
3. On the Create a profile blade, select Windows 10 and later > Settings catalog and click Create
4. On the Basics page, provide at least a unique name to distinguish it from similar profiles and click Next
5. On the Configuration settings page, as shown below in Figure 1, perform the following actions and click Next

• Click Add settings, navigate to Microsoft Edge > Identity and sign-in and select the following settings in Settings picker
  • Configure the automatic profile switching site list, Guided Switch Enabled, Switch intranet sites to a work profile, and Switch sites on the IE mode site list to a work profile
• Switch the slider to the left for all selected settings to disable the setting conform the recommended security settings

6. On the Scope tags page, configure the required scope tags and click Next
7. On the Assignments page, configure the assignment for the required user or devices and click Next
8. On the Review + create page, verify the configuration and click Create

Note: The setting Configure the automatic profile switching site list can be configured with a list of sites and their behavior. That requires a specific notation to link a site to a profile. Here is a brief example for a site that links to the work profile and one that links to the personal profile [ { "profile": "Work", "site": "portal.office.com" }, { "profile": "Personal", "site": "petervanderwoude.nl" } ].

Experiencing automatic switching in Microsoft Edge for Business

When the created configuration for automatic switching in Microsoft Edge for Business is successfully applied, it’s time to verify the configuration. There are multiple ways to achieve that, but the most efficient and effective way is by simply looking at the browser settings. Most of the settings are available within the same section. Simply open Microsoft Edge and navigate to Profiles > Profile experience > Automatic profile switching. That directly shows that the browser is managed an that multiple settings are specifically managed (those with the suitcase). The main settings, as shown below in Figure 2, are the following:

1. Account based profile switching is disabled via Guided Switch Enabled and basically turns off the automatic switching
2. Intranet based profile switching is disabled via Switch intranet sites to a work profile and basically turns off the automatic switching for intranet sites
3. IE Mode based profile switching is disabled via Switch sites on the IE mode site list to a work profile and basically turns off the automatic switching for sites listed in the IE mode site list

Note: The setting Configure the automatic profile switching site list is not shown in this view, as it contains an administrator curated list with sites and profiles that takes precedence over the heuristics Microsoft Edge uses for switching sites.

More information

For more information about Microsoft Edge Workspaces, refer to the following docs.

• Microsoft Edge for Business | Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft Edge Browser Policy Documentation | Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft Edge for Business FAQ – Microsoft Community Hub