Enable 'Sign in as Different User' in SharePoint 2013

Introduction

One of the useful features of SharePoint 2010 is to sign in as different user option. By default, SharePoint 2013 does not have this option. In this article we are going to see how we can bring this option in SharePoint 2013.

Scenario:

In SharePoint 2010 site, when you click on the right side on the login user name, a small pop up appears which shows a few options, one of which is Sign in as Different user. This feature is not available in the SharePoint 2013 by default.



Solution:

There are two ways to add this feature in SharePoint 2013.

1. Update the SharePoint file system. This will make this feature available in all the SharePoint sites.
   
   
2. If you don’t want to update the file system, you can still archive this. We will see later in this article.
   
   Let us see the first approach, updating the File System:
   
   Follow the below steps to update the file system,
   
   go to the below location:
   
   C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft shared\Webserver Extensions\15\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES
   
   in this folder search for the welcome.ascx file.
   
   
3. Open the welcome.ascx file in Visual Studio :
   
   
4. Look for the tag in the file <SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server id="ID_PersonalInformation"
   
   
5. Add the following code after the above tag,
   
   
   
   
6. Save the file. That you are done, the final output will be as in the following screenshot,
   
   
   

This is only useful when you have access to the file system and only possible in SharePoint 2013 on premise.

Now what if you don’t have access to the file system, you can still do it by other approaches which will be explained below,

If you don’t have access to File System:

In this approach, you have to append the site url with, For example: if this is your site collection url, then in order to login as different user, here's the final url.

It will ask you to login again.