Sign In As A Different User In SharePoint

I’ve seen or searched for this about a million times so far, so why not write up a quick post about it…

With SharePoint 2013, a decision was made to remove the “Sign in as different user” option.  It was a weird decision to take that out and yet leave in the “Sign Out” option considering most people using SharePoint are in a corporate environment with access to Active Directory.

This creates a rather confusing situation for the user where they click the “Sign Out” button, close the browser and when they reopen the browser they are signed in again.  To the average end user it looks like they were never actually signed out and that the sign out button is useless.

For me as a developer, I absolutely loved the ability to sign out and sign back in as a different user because it allowed me to quickly switch between users as I was testing my site.  Luckily, while the option is now hidden from users, the functionality remains.

In order to sign out and sign in as a different user, all you need to do is use the close connection URL:

_layouts/closeConnection.aspx?loginasanotheruser=true

So if you want to quickly logout and log in as someone else, all you need to do is go to:

http://<sharepoint_site>/_layouts/closeConnection.aspx?loginasanotheruser=true

Since this link is so incredibly useful to me, I generally end up putting a link to it in my favorites bar when I’m working on testing the site, or even a temporary link in the masterpage for other testers to click on as the site is developed.