- Work or school account
- Personal account
I get this prompt every time I try to log into Azure with my work email. If I choose the work account (the most intuitive option) my azure subscription list is empty. I have to log out and select the other option.
Why is there a difference and why isn't this transparent? I am authenticated, you know who I am, give me access to the things I'm authorized for. I don't know what kind of weird backend situation MS has, but asking me to understand it is terrible UX.
This was a mistake and has been patched. But it looks like an MSA was created using the same email as your AAD before the fix.
Thus, from MS's perspective, there are two distinct accounts under the same email, hence the UX. It's really quite a mess, and yes the situation is weird. We're working on it make it better.
Try transferring the subscriptions to your work email using this method https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-subsc...
then onenote gets involved in the mix, which gets stored in onedrive. but the surface pen can only call the onedrive that accesses onedrive personal (msa) not onedrive individual corporate, because there are two onenotes, one built into windows one into office. the pen eraser can not be reprogrammed to use the PAID FOR CORPORATE onenote, just the free app. so never click the button on the only peripheral of the three thousand dollar computer you just bought, because it will lead you somewhere you dont want to go. so now onenotes are stored in the wrong onedrive. also for some reason your computer still has the onedrive for business client, formerly, sharepoint sync, formerly groove (acquired from ray ozzie who also tortured you introducing Lotus Notes to the world, back in the day) which is depricated, lets update you to onedrive, formerly live mesh, but now the correct client to use to access your aad onedrive for business. yes im sorry, one drive for business is no longer developed but you use onedrive not for business to access your onedrive for business which is different from your personal onedrive, and also different from groups. yes you could use the share feature to share documents in your individual (corporate not personal) onedrive with others, but the more correct way to sustainablty collaborate is by using gropu onedrives. and yes, you still have to click sync for each group/document library again on your second third and fourth computer, because sync settings cant be stored in the cloud or pushed to other users. if you want to mount your group/onedrive/sharepointteamsitedocumentlibrary as a drive letter without caching and syncing it we need to install a third party zeedrive service, because windows cant remount sharepoint drive letters on reboot well.
and microsoft wonders why people prefer dropbox/box....
tldr: teams vs teamsites (completely different). i can add people to groups or teamsites from outlook groups or teams, right? yes you can add people to teamsites from teams, but they are completely different things. msa onedrive vs aad onedrive vs group onedrive (not called a onedrive usually but accessable through the onedrive web/windows/mobile client using the onedrive api.) onenote vs onenote 2016. skype vs skype for business. channels vs folders, vs document libraries vs teamsites vs groups vs teams!>??!?! :( :( :(seriously why the fuck does my phone have onedrive, sharepoint, outlook groups, outlook, AND teams to get to files stored in and out of my office 365 groups, oh and lens can only scan to my aad onedrive, not a group. no messages cant pass between exchange, yammer, teams, and skype, except when they sometimes do poorly between teams and skype (for business of course, not skype.) why is outlook groups the only app with a follow button. from why when i follow an office 365 group team site document library (what should be called a group onedrive!!!) does it NOT show up in either onedrive nor sharepoint. why is the follow button different in teams, outlook groups, and the sharepoint web interface! yes there is a desktop teams app, but its really a copy of chrome without any chrome running web app locally on your computer, using at technology called electron which packages a client version of a javascript engine repackaged as a server repackaged as a client. i digress. but its sure not .net. and yes they use chrome, not edge. which isnt internet explorer. nor file explorer.
remember that time Bill Gates tried to download something off Microsoft's website. He should try using Office 365 for a week with a team of people. (http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...)
If it's a company domain then there's not much reason to have personal account with the same work email address.
Every login will prompt to select the organizational account, or the personal account.
Not sure why only MS is being called out for it ... they probably modeled their system after Google.
Unfortunately you cannot merge. Google services will have an option to switch between the different accounts. The priority order is shared, and to change the order you have to log out of all your accounts and log in again, with the primary account first. I decided to keep my @gmail.com account first, so I only have to switch to the @example.com account when I check GMail.
Could be much better, of course. I was personally a bit frustrated with the process.
The private account is the one created by you.
If anyone knows the exact difference, please explain! Would be greatly appreciated.
The Personal accounts (also called Microsoft accounts/IDs or Live IDs) are the ones you as an individual create directly with Microsoft. The prime example would be people who've had a Hotmail account for ages, and that eventually became a Microsoft account.
The confusion comes because since a couple years ago, you can create Microsoft accounts with any e-mail that you own, be it personal, from work, hosted in gmail, hosted by your employer, hosted by yourself... You name it. So it is possible to create a Microsoft account with your work e-mail, even if your work e-mail also has a Work/School Account tied to it. All the notifications for that Microsoft account will go there, but they are not for your "Work/School Account" (also referred to as Organizational account), they are for your personal one.
Yes, it is a mess. After a while I got used to it and now I'm comfortable navigating all my identities, but it can be very annoying when you first encounter it.
Gawd.. You're microsoft, you can create a whole new security protocol. Don't have this half baked persona solution.
If you can't figure this out, it really reinforces the reason for every time we come across something in Azure where we're like wtf isn't this feature supported?
Coupled with the fact that I'd enabled 2FA made for a ridiculously poor user experience. By the end of the process I was so pissed off, I'm not sure if I'll ever use Azure or Office 365 again... we'll see.
They did add an option so you can change your personal account's email address so you don't have to deal with account namespace issues.
The other day I wanted to check if a windows key I had is still valid for another fresh installation before wiping my HDD. I don't even remeber the whole endavour, but I had to install some specific MS software for it...
Amazon manages to keep multiple accounts of mine, with the same email, but different passwords.
Though the more bothersome one in my mind, is that I can't login to gmail in chrome without attaching it to chrome... I don't want to attach my work email to my home chrome browser (which forces a couple extensions, and my home page). So I've opted to run both Chrome Canary (work) and Chrome release (home/personal)... It seems even worse UX when you have multiple google accounts you want to keep separate.
As to Skype, it's been weird since MS bought them, and I remember having great pain migrating/attaching to my MS account so I can have a single login, and it was just weird for some while.
Aside: I'm glad google domains includes DNS and email forwarders, so I can keep my really old domain emails forwarding to my gmail so I can on occasion recover old accounts.
I use LastPass religiously, but I don't even try to make it work with MS accounts.
- My Office University account expires.
- My father invites me to be part of his Office 365 Family subscription (it includes 5 accounts).
- I click on the "Get the invite" button on the email I have received and... "You already have an active account".
There was no way from the website to cancel my expired University account, the only available option was to subscribe to my own Office 365 Personal account (€10/month).
I have contacted Microsoft and it took 90 minutes of chat, including a one hour session where a Microsoft support guy took control of my computer (it was totally useless, the error has been solved by a modification in the Microsoft account database), to fix the issue. As titled here: this is insane.
IIRC my boss wasted a few hours on the phone with two MS employees - spread over a week or two because their accounting and customer service teams couldn't speak together it seems.
I however was lucky, some tool I had bought was missing from my Windows Store account, after contacting them they contacted me back and I had it fixed within 20 minutes or something.
Apple is actually getting close to this bad, too, and in some ways, worse.
I gave my mother my old iPhone over a year ago. It was wiped, and we set it up with the 'family' whatsit. For reasons I won't go in to, at some point, I ended up giving her my Apple ID password to fix a problem when I couldn't do it.
Ever since then, something has periodically decided to sync a random assortment of things. It isn't consistent, temporally or in terms of what it syncs. (I'm very anti-cloud-service; I don't use online backup, sync or cloud docs or any other sync services from Apple. I think my other uses the backup, but nothing else, because the phone is her only Apple device.)
A few months ago, her contacts ended up splattered all over mine. I deleted them, it happened again a few days later, this time just a random assortment of them.
Yesterday, my call logs ended up on her phone.
Short of asking her to wipe the phone again, I don't know how to make this crap stop, but I'm sick of it. Seriously considering going back to a feature phone; everyone making modern phones appear to (a) make it impossible to have a self-contained phone without your personal life smeared across multiple companies' servers, and (b) be too incompetent to actually smear my personal life across their servers without fucking it up.
I won't ask about the reasons, but it seems like everything in your email is a consequence of you setting up someone else's phone to use your account information.
Sure, going to a feature phone would solve that, but so would not actually sharing your account with someone else. What else did you expect?
In other words, how could Apple differentiate between "it's my account but not my phone" and "it's my account and it is my phone"?
Because the phone in question used that Apple id precisely once, and is now configured with hers?
There's obviously some foreign key floating around keeping the association, even though it should not be there.
And that's ignoring the question of why and how, when syncing, backup, etc is turned off, my phone logs are even being sent to Apple at all, let alone leaked through to another phone? Same question with contacts - if I am not syncing or backing up, why does Apple grab my contacts?
> What else did you expect?
I expect, when logging in to a device with a given account, to only have access to things associated with that account.
I also expect, when configuring something to not share data, that it not share data.
Do you really have different expectations?
Additionally, group chats often split in to two windows where the conversation suddenly continues in a second thread even when no one joined/left... and then you try and reply and it jumps to another conversation on its own.
People in my office have recorded this because it's so obtuse and unbelievable.
I used to use Pidgin with the SIPE plugin, which worked well enough, and most importantly, logged in plain HTML with a fully working search mechanism, and if it came to it, I could just grep the folder.
Unfortunately my company recently moved to cloud-hosted S4B, and that completely broke Pidgin, so I've been forced onto the official client.
Someone at Microsoft really needs to learn the meaning of 'improvement'.
Assuming you're in a corp environment, that's likely an IT decision, not a MS one. If you go to Options -> Personal there are two checkboxes for saving IM conversations and call logs in your Conversation History folder in Outlook. Mine are grayed out because IT decided to disable them (I'm sure to meet some corp requirement).
Strange thing is that indeed, the "save conversations" option is grayed out (unckecked) in S4B, yet we are allowed to use Slack.
I'd like to change the username of my basic Skype account. Alas, it has the company name I worked for at the time. I also have some credits in that account. I'd either like my credits back, or I'd like to change my Skype username. Neither are possible.
I'd also like Microsoft to stop asking me if I'm using a business account, or a personal account, when I enter my work email address into every Microsoft service we use every day.
That'd be nifty, too.
In addition to those 3 accounts, I had 2 Office accounts (one for work, one personal). Notwithstanding that the O365 sign in really can't handle two accounts on the same browser (by ways of automatic redirects) - I didn't know if services were on O365 or Live. MSDN and VSTS do not support O365 login, so I had to tell my Live account to claim my MSDN keys. It's nuts.
I eventually just forget about accounts. I stopped using O365 for personal email. Don't use O365 for anything personal, you will pay hell for it (for more reasons than merely sign in).
I don't have a mobile phone so that's fine, I can get texts on Google Hangouts or Skype but their account software refuses to send the verification texts to those numbers.
Fortunately there's an option to have them call you but they refuse to send call my home phone system that is registered with my name and that is a valid e911 number associated with an e911 address. A call with a Microsoft support person confirmed that nope, I can not sign up for Azure.
/s
What a cluster MSFT
EDIT: And guess what, I have not used Skype since. Trying to recreate my contacts and the whole process of having family accept my new account was a much larger barrier than just instructing my family to use another video chat service. FU MSFT.
+ chat history seems to work
+ dark mode
- no cross platform video calling (except to web)
- way less settings (like notification configuration stuff, all sorts of settings)
The only thing I really use skype for is skyping to family members. Now I can't do that, because cross platform video doesn't work. The old skype worked and had more features and settings! Why force me to switch when the new version isn't feature-complete!
I need to get access to my Microsoft Office online documents. I go to login and it has me do a security check with my email: microsoft@mydomain.com. It's supposed to send a code to verify my email, but I never get it. So I try option 2, a different email: microsoft@myotherdomain.com. Never get the code...
Hmm, does it not like the word microsoft? So I try myname@mydomain.com, and I get the code! Although now I have to answer a bunch of questions and my account is under review -- I should get an answer within 24 hours.
But what about the future? My real account is still microsoft@mydomain.com. Will this keep happening? :\
I once subscribed to Office and am pretty sure I had to supply my first and last name once if not multiple times. But the final confirmation email still started with "Dear null null".
I love MS stuff, but they have the worst account process ever, closely followed by Apple.
I do wish MS would sort their act out in regards to accounts.
I lost my Xbox account trying to transfer my games and such between my windows live account and an old account. Lost my games and points and credits :(
So I'm migrating everything to Inbox (Gmail) and people don't care at all switching to Hangouts instead of Skype.
Old skype account - kinda bad password.
MS account - great password, 2FA.
Then I got alerts that someone in China had logged in to my MS account. I couldn't figure out how they'd done this until...
I figured out they'd signed in to skype, using my old skype username and old skype password that were still valid for some unknown reason after merging it in to my far more secure MS account.
Back in the 1990s I worked as a tech and programmer. I issued bug reports to Microsoft and they would fix them in the next service pack or version. But in doing so they'd change the Windows API calls which broke my Visual Basic programs. I had the Dan Appleman book on API calles but had to surf the net for the changes made to them on Microsoft blogs for developers or Yahoo Clubs on programming, etc. Everytime they made a book, it was outdated as soon as it was published.
I can remember having an issue with a Windows API call in the 90's and having to go on usenet to find someone who knew where to download an example program that Microsoft inexplicably removed from subsequent MSDN CDs.
Another point is that you cannot use a "work account" you use in office365 as your personal account for OneDrive etc.
All for a service (skype) I rarely use.
I have like 3 old skype accounts which shows up with my name which I can't access due to me not having the email addresses anymore nor do I remember the passwords, so it is a pain when people try to add me on skype and I contacted them and asked if they could delete my old accounts since I can't access them and they said that is not possible since I don't remember all the security questions and answers, wouldn't even give me the questions so I could have a chance at answering them..
Edit: added TL;DR
These situations where you mix personal and enterprise/job accounts become edge cases that can be catastrophic for users stuck in them after they leave companies.
Protip, don't name anything expecting you can change it later. See also: S3 buckets.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oaccou...
Difference for me is that I have no idea how the work account was created. I do an have Office365 account from my employer but we just recently switched and I had this problem before that account was created. Also, that Office365 account is linked to my actual work email. The problem I am experiencing is a "work" account that was mysteriously created on my personal email and it makes no sense. Over a month and no one has responded.
Anyone here have any ideas?
The number of services that don't allow this is also insane. Its as if they use the username itself as a key, rather than one that is masked from the user allowing such changes.
I didn't know which my login were and it was random which contacts I would see and which contacts were able to message me at all.
I just gave up on it and never looked back.
If someone goes offline, Skype will show you how long they have been offline for. Except....that it's just a random number. I can set my status to offline right now, and my coworker will see that I've been offline for.....168 days. Or 700 days. Or 35 minutes.
Microsoft knew about this bug for years, and there is no fix for it.
Frequently, when I send messages to my coworkers, they appear ABOVE older messages in the coversation, which is extremely confusing, because obviously the whole window will flash to indicate you got a new message, but in reality you have to scroll up to actually see it.
Highlighting text is just broken, I dare anyone from MS to reliably highlight just a portion of text without the selection jumping to seemingly random part of the window without any indication how or why.
Arbitrarily low character limit, so you can't paste snippets of code.
During conference calls, audio just dies from time to time, and the only thing you can do about it is kill the conversation and start again. This is a product based off Skype, for fucks sake, that MS is charging us millions of dollars for globally, and that doesn't even have the basic functionality working correctly.
Consumer Skype is still an entirely separate code base. The two IM platforms don't even speak the same protocol, and just barely interoperate.
The naming change is illogical as all hell, but Microsoft bought Skype, and suddenly Lync needed to be rebranded under the Skype umbrella. Before it was Lync, it was Office Communicator, before that Live Communicator, and before that, I believe went under an MSN name. It's always been hitched to the latest marketing bandwagon.
Lync/S4B is, sadly, one of the better enterprise IM systems, in comparison to other big players in that space, like Sametime, Jabber or Hipchat. It's still hot garbage.
An event I'm going to requires a Skype account of a preliminary interview. So I go to sign up with my gmail, and I'm able to create an account. However, I already had a Skype account through MS's weird Outlook program (I signed up with my gmail for Outlook, and it automatically created a Skype account without telling me . . . for the gmail account).
This bricks both accounts by loading to an error page when I login, telling me to go to MS's website to fix my account. I go there and then after spelunking through the maze of a UI, finally get to a page that tells me I need to call Microsoft to diagnosis the problem.
Screw that noise. It's 2017, this is archaic.
Luckily, there's a third option for signing up and that's through a phone number. I do that, but now I don't know what to enter for the username field in my interview app. I look through Skype's help docs, and it doesn't say anything about phone numbers.
I assumed my phone number is my username and that's how people can add me. Anyway, that's what I put in the app and I'm hoping that the UN acts like a UN and not a phone number with calling charges.
What a mess. It's also partly the event's fault for using Skype when better alternatives exist.
If you have a outlook.com email, a merged a legacy skype account, and 2FA, what is the attack method that can be used against you?
So I sign in to the new Skype, and can't remember my password. That's OK, I'll just get them to reset it. Oh, my email address expired while my PC was sitting on the junk heap? That's OK, I'll follow their prompts, this shouldn't be too difficult.
"Unfortunately, we were unable to verify your ownership of this account using the information you provided. [...]
Please submit a new account verification form At this point, your best option is to submit a new form with as much accurate information as you can gather."
I've provided the details of six different users who were on my contact list, the complete email address I used to use, and there is nothing else I can do. No email address I can contact, no phone number to ring.
Oh, and most importantly, there's no "Import old account settings" option.
Screw you, Microsoft.
And then I read your post today... I'm glad I closed my Surface and went back to my MacBook last night...
Ref: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Outlook/Can-t-connect...
Their support is the worst; they were totally unable to even comprehend the problem I was seeing, let alone fix it. I just gave up trying to use them.
I basically moved from Skype to Zoom.us with all my clients
Are you referring to a different product, or are there copies of old enterprise skype server systems floating around out there?
I'm currently dealing with an issue with different versions of the same (MS) software getting authenticated via a domain but ending up pointing at two different MS accounts associated with the same email address, and hence consuming two licenses. 2 weeks of "support" back and forth hasn't helped, they seem to have good tooling to introspect what is happening.
Six months and multiple support calls later and I'm still receiving Azure billing information and Xbox newsletters at the old address.
edit: it becomes a special annoyance when an app decides to lock you out after n days (n usually = 30). Great from a security POV but hell is that annoying if it happens to multiple apps at once on a day. Or when you have 20+ apps with unique logins when you reset your phone... as login credentials/tokens are (rightfully) not cloud synced. Android desperately needs a password-autocomplete API, secured by e.g. the fingerprint sensor found on new-ish Samsung devices.
GRR Martin still uses Wordstar in a DOS machine because he doesn't trust Windows to not crash or reboot on him and lose his data.
Problem is the Microsoft tax on Intel or AMD PCs that OEMs have to pay even if they don't install Windows or Office. But now Office 2016 is installed but user needs to buy a key to use it for activation.
I suggest that people use Libreoffice because it can read docx files etc.
Corporate account, used for Windows logon
Skype personal account
XBox account because they made me make one when my kids were young
A second personal account used for something I forget. Posting on MS help fora possibly.
Mind you I have three active Google accounts.
Reddit discusses hackers using weak Skype credentials to access other MS accounts and bypass 2FA
though i still see in recent activity unsuccessful attempts for IMAP synchronization from all over world, not sure if they are trying to use some old app password, which i reset after discovering have
It's russian roulette every time I try to login to something that's authenticated with Microsoft accounts, and trying to remember which login I need to use to access which resources is more than I can keep track of, across outlook, MSDN, forums, Azure, Active Directory, etc, etc.
