At UT Knoxville, we provide many services to faculty, staff, and students that require one to log in or “authenticate.” We work hard to ensure these packages know it is you by standardizing access with your UT NetID and password. Unfortunately, there are slightly different approaches among our software vendors, and even when we standardize, there are subtle nuances. 

Central Authentication Service (CAS)

We encourage as many campus services as possible to use our Central Authentication Service (CAS).  This is the sign-in page you see when you log into Canvas, MyUTK, and MyIRiS/IRIS Web and only requires NetID, password, and two-factor authentication(2FA). However, our email systems work a little differently. Microsoft and Google offer cloud-based email, storage, collaboration, and other services to almost anyone who wants them. To tell Microsoft and Google that you need to log into your UT account, you must use your full email address, either NetID@utk.edu (Faculty/Staff) or NetID@vols.utk.edu (Students) and then your NetID password and 2FA when prompted. 

For some services, like Zoom, you must provide them with enough information to get you to CAS. 

Here are some examples:

• Zoom: Select the Single Sign-On (SSO) option and then enter ‘tennessee’ before zoom.us. This tells Zoom that you are using a UT Zoom account, as opposed to a personal account. Once they have their required information, they will send you on to the CAS login page.
• Adobe: Enter your NetID@tennessee.edu email address when asked for an email address. This information tells Adobe to send you to the CAS login page.

We strive to ensure consistency and integrity for our single sign-on. From the examples above, you can see that despite some minor differences, all authentication referenced above ultimately uses a combination of NetID, password, and two-factor authentication(2FA).

Services that require tennessee.edu instead of utk.edu

The University of Tennessee System included several campuses, and we collaborate on a number of software licenses. Like Zoom and Adobe, these applications require ‘tennessee.edu’. Other contracts are campus specific and will point to a single campus, for example, ‘utk.edu’. Each campus has its own email domain, which is why we use our campus email address (in our case Knoxville-area) instead of a statewide address.

We know it gets complicated!  Visit our knowledge base for a few suggestions to help you keep it straight.