Microsoft's accounts are just managed horribly in general. I've got two microsoft accounts for work and one for personal. The personal one I separate out by having a different chrome profile. However, for work, I have to wrestle with the login screen for about 6 iterations everytime I want a new tab. I use one MS account for azure, another for office 365. Regardless of which one I enter/select, it always prompts me for the password for the other account. Drives me effing nuts. Plus that whol "is this a business account or a personal account" selection. jesus. so frustrating.
That drives me insane as well. I expect it is nessecary in some fashion, but the implementation is severely frustrating. It should be "sticky" and allow you to switch if required.
Also the personal accounts can only have 16 character max passwords, so my normal wetware password generation algorithms don't work
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.
It looks like [email] is used with more than one account. Which account do you want to use?
- 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.
The 'non-company' account is created manually by signing up for a new microsoft account and then clicking the activation link in the email you receive.
The school/work account is somehow created by a company administrator, but I don't know exactly how or where.
Work or school is a federated option, using ADFS to do the authentication using your company's Active Directory info. If you choose that, when you enter your work email address, it'll redirect you to your company's ADFS login page. It's used a lot with Azure AD.
As you said. the Work/School Account is one provided by your employer (normally), and usually comes from Active Directory (or AzureAD).
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.
Yes, but as a consumer I don't care about that differentiation.. Just make it transparent.. merge my authorization rules or something...
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?
I'd wager there's something enforcing that distinction such as licensing rules for products you might have access to.
But, ultimately, those licensing rules may be under MS's control as well. Even if they aren't, it sounds like it has a significant impact on their service's design and usability, so it's in their interest to make a change somewhere.
Your 'work/school account' is managed by your work. They can close it at any time, and you would no longer have access to it. Your personal account via the same email address is an account you created with Microsoft. Even if your work/school take away your email address, that account will still exist (just that if you no longer have access to that email you won't be able to retrieve password resets or whatever for it).
It doesn't matter. A collection of roles/claims are associated with each account, resulting in different authorization profiles.
Just merge them into a single collection and have my experience be dictated by that merged collection. With how entrenched they are with the Enterprise world, they should have foreseen this scenario and designed their family of products to facilitate this seamless merging of authorization rules across disparate accounts.
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.
Amazon does this because, when it was founded, it was common for entire families to share the same email account so they built in support for multiple accounts mapped to the same email address. I knew someone who was in charge of maintaining it and it was a legacy nightmare mess.
Google does the same thing when a customer previously used their own "branded" email for Google services, and then switches to use G Suite (formally Google Apps).
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.
That's not what Google does. (Edit: It sounds like Google used to do this. I switched to G Suite very recently and did not end up with an account in this state.) If you have an existing joe@example.com Google account and then sign up for G Suite as the owner of example.com, what happens is the old joe@example.com account gets divorced from its email and given a new temporary name. You can then change it to a new @gmail.com but that change is permanent.
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.
I mean, that is exactly what Google does. Google does allow the change you listed above, which is nice. But if you don't explicitly change your accounts, you keep getting the "pick an account" screen on every single login, just like the parent described, and just like Microsoft shows users too.
To clear up the confusion: Google has that UI, but it's legacy. They no longer allow you get your account into that state; new G Suite accounts and personal Google Accounts can't use the same address.
How legacy? Personally I made this change/split maybe 12-15 months ago and still get the prompt. I'm also pretty sure I had a client with this same issue recently, although I can't confirm with certainty. I routinely migrate clients TO G Suite which is why I have some first-hand exp here.
Also, when signing up the Google system will not allow you to use the same email (if it's registered) but once you "take over" or verify domain ownership, you can then claim / use that address - which I believe creates this situation.
I got into a confused state with my Youtube account where I have two accounts linked to the same Google account. One of them lists all my subscriptions but doesn't allow me to comment. The other one can comment but says it has no subscriptions on the sidebar but I can see all of my subscriptions if I click the subscriptions button.
I occasionally have to perform some bizarre incantation once in a blue moon to switch accounts when I want to comment on something and then switch back so I can see my subscriptions again.
If Google had the same terrible UX, I would rant about that as well, but I've never had a single problem with any of my Google accounts. I cringe every time I have to do any type of maintenance on one of my MS accounts because I know it's going to be terrible, and it always is.
I just went through this exact thing last night when I had to remove an old Azure and Outlook 365 subscription that I stopped using months ago. It literally took me 4 hours to figure out how to get into all the correct accounts to remove the active directory users from Azure, remove all the user subscriptions for Outlook 365, remove my Azure subscriptions so I could stop being billed and then finally delete my domain from GoDaddy.
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.
Back in the days MS used to allow you to create a "Microsoft Account" (MSA) using any email, including an email that's already associated with Azure Active Directory (AAD work or school account).
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.
that is just a microcosm of how bad the situation is. I dont think microsoft fully understands how impossible it is to have a conversation with a lay person using microsofts correct terms. "no not skype, what you want is skype for business (a completely different unrelated product), then you want to access a folder in your microsoft office 365 group team site document library (no not teams, thats different) through the onedrive client, unless in this case you want to use the sharepoint app, err no the onedrive app, err no the OUTLOOK GROUPS, no not the outlook app, the outlook groups app (not office groups??? why????) app because the sharepoint AND onedrive app dont have that feature. You can access your group team site onedrive files from sharepoint, or outlook groups, or onedrive, but if you use the teams app you can only see the files stored in channels, which are the same as folders in your onedrive/sharepointteamsitedocumentlibrary except they are also chat rooms in teams. If you want to scan something you need officelens or onedrive, but not sharepoint or outlook groups because they dont have a scan button nor teams, because that cant upload to groups/channels/subfoldersinteamsitedocumentlibraries, so you need onedrive which has a scan button. once you open onedrive (ios) you need to click sites to get to groups, because groups are in the sites tab, even though no other onedrive interface uses the sites nomenclature, nor is sites often used sans teams. then click the group name, then click documents (because thats the only option unless you make other document libraries. if you make non shared20%documents libraries, they are inaccessable from some clients such as OWA/attachgroupfiles. so dont ever ever make them, but you will still have to click documents ever time you click the group. every time. but if you want to make another document library to partition some large files into a different document library, to prevent accident giant syncs of data, you will need to click sync again. for every document library. on every persons computer.) If someone scans something to the root of the shared20%documents folder, its inaccessable from teams because it didnt make it to a channel. And if they made a different document library, its roulette whether or not varous clients can see it or if they just autoassume shared20%documents. Oh it looks like you did all this is in your microsoft account not your office account, now you have to start over and cant move your data automatically. Yes Im sorry that onedrive personal is different from onedrive corporate which is different from a (onedrive) office 365 groupteamsitedocumentlibrary.... ... here let me teach you the EASY WAY to do this. MEMORIZE tenent.sharepoint.com/sites/groupname/Shared%20Documents, and just type that right into the address bar, its much faster to MEMORIZE that string than it is to navigate the user interface. i promise you should memorize it to save time. no really im not kidding, i emplore you to memorize the url structure instead of learning the interface. fine, we can continue, lets walk through all the clicks one more time.
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 c...
And then there's the interesting conversation that ensues when someone says they can't send mail in outlook. Outlook on the desktop, for windows or for mac, or maybe on the web, either outlook.com or outlook for business or outlook web access, or perhaps on mobile, on windows phone or android or iOS. All of those things are very different. It seems like writing a new outlook is the break-in project for any new team in microsoft, cause they have more outlooks than they know what to do with.
If you want to know what outlook you have, here's a handy article they made to help you figure it out. Mind you, they forgot about outlook for windows phone, but with that many outlooks who can blame them?
dont even get me started about the difference between follow and sync, and that you have to press sync for each document library you make, which includes each group you make, and no you cant just turn on sync for each person you add to the group, they both need to sync to their windows client, and follow so it shows up in their mobile app.
so the new sync process. go to office.com, sign in, click mail or onedrive. click the group. if mail, click files. now it brings you to a list of recent files as shown on a client served by the exchange server. to get to the correct sharepoint served web client, you need to click browse files in the upper right corner. no dont worry, your folders arent gone, the exchange client just brilliantly collapses the entire structure and shows only the files, in order of most recent. once you get onto the sharepoint server your folders will reappear. then click sync, then click allow, then yes, then sync now. then wait. if i add 30 people to a group, i have to walk all thirty through syncing and following. and dont worry as soon as i train them the sync button will be renamed. my new favorite one. there are now THREE terms used in different spots that all lead you back to the office 365 group team site document library (aka group onedrive.) they include: Open in Sharepoint, Browse Library, and Go to Site. For some damn reason, in the teams app "Open in Sharepoint" is the term used to launch the onedrive group web client, but in exchange its Browse Library or Go to Site.
Funny how they have that problem of one name for a bunch of things, but also the problem of many names for the same thing.
When you say Outlook account, do you mean Hotmail? Outlook.com? Live.com? MSN.com? Microsoft Account? Windows Live ID? Windows 10 login? Windows phone login? XBox login? .Net Passport?
This happens with "Visual Studio". When someone says "Visual Studio" won't work, do you mean VS Enterprise or VS Code--two totally different products. Come to find out they really mean visualstudio.com which is sometimes call VS Online or more like VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services). Some people who have been around just refer to it as TFS (Team Foundation Services) but that is more closely tied to TFVC (Team Foundation Verison Control) but VSTS supports Git.
I love analysis like this that does nothing more than describe how something is implemented. The most effective criticism is that which simply describes and doesn't editorialize. This comment is a perfect example of how the divides between teams at large companies results in absolute absurdity for the user.
It's a marketing and ux problem. Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products. Groups, teams, etc. why is it Office Groups but Microsoft Teams. Is Microsoft ToDo part of Office? Why is Teams basically Skype/Lynx+Sharepoint but not Office?
Enterprise Architecture teams have their work cut out trying to describe the choices they make.
> Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products.
I wonder if there's a sort of internal fighting for each team to squat on the "best" names for their product or service. Basically a Dilbertian confusopoly [0] where the goal is to make your project sound like "the obvious choice" regardless of its merits, with "Microsoft" on the front as the only way it stops being impossible to trademark.
I imagine other large companies struggle with this as well, although Amazon seems to have taken to the other extreme [1].
Branding teams and divisions are getting in the way of coherence and usability. I think ONE of the worst right now is the OneDrive vs SharePoint back and forth. First they were kind of hiding the SharePoint name, and renaming everything onedrive. SharePoint Workspace, formerly Microsoft Office Groove, became OneDrive for Business (because it was the client sync tool, not a server.) Now its making a comeback and certain things are "not" OneDrive, such as 'Office 365' Groups '''SharePoint 'Team Site'' 'Document Libraries''
At least in the Mail world the divide MOSTLY makes sense. Outlook is the Client, Exchange is the server. Yes, the OWA web/javascript client streams from the server and renders in your browser, but otherwise the divide is mostly intact. You NEVER see an Exchange app, and you rarely see the word outside the content of "connect to this server." The SharePoint branding team on the other hand cant handle being the server only and has now forced a SharePoint app that is like some bastardized fork of the OneDrive app. They mostly do the same thing, but not quite. Microsoft needs to draw a line and say "OneDrive = Client, SharePoint = Server" and try and not cross it. The OneDrive web client should be an interface that streams from the SharePoint server to your browser.
I wish they would have left 'Lync' as the "server" to the various clients.
I'm thinking Microsoft is just terrible at saying NO. Especially NO to certain naming, feature and product requests coming from marketing. It needs more architects with decision power for each product line that curate and focus their efforts.
This could be resolved by sending an email notice telling people exactly what's happening and giving them the option to collapse their personal/non-work Microsoft accounts into the current work/managed accounts.
If it's a company domain then there's not much reason to have personal account with the same work email address.
You'll need to go to your subscription settings in Azure Portal, and in the Access Control (IAM) options, you can add the other account as an authorized user of your Azure subscription. Once you do this, you can use your subscription from both accounts. It works kind of like Active Directory.
What's sometimes really bothersome to me, is when I had autologin in either chrome and/or my lastpass, and it would constantly push through the right or wrong password and/or account, because they're on different screens.
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.
This is bad, and I'm not letting Microsoft off the hook here. But, there's an easy workaround for this particular case: Use an alias, such as myrealemail+msft@example.com, for the new account.
This is why I use Postfix and Cyrus for my personal mail. I get Postfix to pre-parse transform the '-' char to '+'; this way I can use email addresses that stupid systems don't barf at but can still get mail delivered to the right mailbox (including sub mailbox if it exists). e.g. me-junk@mydomain.tld goes directly to my junk mail box :)
I should have mentioned in the previous post, recipient_canonical_maps is probably what you are looking for. Depending, trivial_rewrite might also fit your use case depending on how early into the delivery process you want the addresses to be rewritten.
thanks for this, i couldn't figure out months ago how could be my Microsoft account compromised despite using 2FA, seem after this hack and resetting all of my security settings they removed ability to sign in with old Skype account since when i went to check it now it was already unchecked
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
I've got at least three different Microsoft accounts with the same email address. Supposedly there's a way to link them, so that this becomes less of a clusterfuck, but I've never been able to make that work. So it's just this big mishmash of resources associated more or less at random between these different accounts.
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.
By ways of some bad choices I wound up with 3 Microsoft accounts. I never knew which services were on each.
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).
Skype accounts are fucked. Try signing in on Skype for Linux with two different accounts. If you're lucky, you'll experience the contact shuffle where some contacts are moved from one account to another and others randomly deleted from both accounts. I mostly stopped using Skype after that one.
On my personal laptop, Skype forced me to update to the "new" skype version that's styled like the windows 10 one. I could no longer log into the old one. This new one is objectively worse.
+ 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!
If you have proof of a repro for this, please reach out to our security team(s), but to the best of my knowledge this is false. 2FA works on both regular and merged Skype and Microsoft Accounts on all endpoints.
Skype no longer works on my wife's Windows 7 laptop. The latest update was pushed without being accompanied by the new MSVC DLL's that it needs, and so doesn't start. I haven't been able to install the redistributable run-time separately, and so it is in a foobared state.
Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC. It's always the question if a chat ends up on your laptop of mobile. You frequently miss chats or have a "you missed a chat" email, even though you were logged in. It is an insanely poor product. I guess it's not where their focus is. It could easily be a Slack alternative except that it is so bad.
> "Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC."
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).
you cant bounce back and forth between the mobile app and your desktop chat and the web chat without some of the clients not getting all the messages. its the exact opposite of facebook messenger. if i start a conversation on my pc, i should be able to continue it on my phone and walk away, and see what i said on my pc when i get back.
Our IT has done this as well...I'm told there are privacy requirements in Germany that equate logging chat history to eavesdropping on phone conversations, so it's illegal to log chat histories. This is insanely annoying since it's easy to accidentally close an active chat window and once the window's closed, the history is permanently gone.
My Skype for Businesses conversation history automatically goes in an Outlook/Exchange folder, so it never gets lost and I can search it. It's possible that our IT has configured this, but it has always worked like that for me, I think even since it was called LCS 2003.
I have such a passionate hate for S4B. This also happens to me, and the logging options mentioned below being enabled don't make a reliable difference: the logs don't always save!
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.
Logs only save if you have S4B synced with your Outlook... Which you don't really want to do, because it will randomly toggle your presence status based on what it thinks your calendar is, and frequently causes issues with your .ost mail file getting locked by either Skype 4 B or Outlook so that the other one can't access it.
In addition to the awful client application, the logging issue is really frikkin' annoying. Something simple like 'show log history for <contact>' doesn't work.
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'.
Teams seems to get (relatively) decent reviews in the Android app store, sadly it's not available in our corporate software portal. I do have Sway installed though (tbh I think Sway can be nice just never saw anyone use it)... maybe I can suggest some alterations to the offering. (Edit: Never mind, I was able to login to teams.microsoft.com using my corporate account and instal everything from there. Thanx for the pointer.)
Strange thing is that indeed, the "save conversations" option is grayed out (unckecked) in S4B, yet we are allowed to use Slack.
Looking into active directory based features in Azure (key vault, etc) convinces me that somehow active directory is to blame for a lot of the confusing account issues around Azure. I get the feeling a lot of the microsoft authentication systems are built on top of active directory, which does not seem like the most straightforward auth system out there.
I love that I can't sign up for Azure services because i need a "real" phone number and no, VOIP numbers like google voice, Microsoft's own Skype or even my actually land line (which is through my ISP and apparently classified as VOIP) won't work.
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.
that's the problem, every site I tried failed their "is this a real phone" check including their own service and the phone that nearly any normal person, technical or otherwise would consider a "land line"
Android still does not support logging in with accounts created by signing in with Facebook, despite dozens of support threads and complaints... in case anyone at MS reads this, it sucks.
Single sign-on. It's really nice to NOT have to copy-paste usernames and passwords from password managers into native apps but use a simple "sign in with FB/Twitter" and it's done. 1 second with a decent internet connection vs 60+s for switching to Keepass, entering the wallet password, actually finding the password, copying the username, switching back to $app, pasting the username, switching back to Keepass, hope it didn't for some reason decide to randomly lock, copy the password, switch back to $app, hope it didn't forget the username in the meantime...
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.
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".
Managing accounts is a massive problem everywhere. I recently moved from Australia to the USA, and I have been having this problem ad-nauseam. Try switching your Google developer account to a US bank, or your amazon, paypal or god knows how many others. I accidentally put skype credits on the wrong skype account, and was hoping to be able to merge accounts somehow, but ending up just deciding it wasn't worth the $20.
I lived in the US, got a paypal account, all good. Moved to sweden, updated address + bank info, still ok. Moved back to USA, now: "You cannot change your country of residence. If you have moved open a new paypal account". WTF? This is a paypal account I've had since the early 2000's.
Yeah I had to basically set up new Ebay and paypal accounts, which is a pain, because you go from having 100's on good reviews as a buyer and seller to having none. It's a hard problem, in some a ways a universal internet ID would make life so much easier, but it would also make tyranny much easier.
As much as I dislike Google services. Their account stuff just works. For everything they create. It just works.
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 :(
I once lost my Xbox Live account because I deleted the associated Hotmail address that I never used. I didn't realize it until the attached credit card expired years later. I went to update the card info on the website and couldn't get on due to the non-existent email address. Spent hours with customer service over multiple calls and no one was able to link the account to a different email address or add a new credit card for me. Just insane.
Not entirely true. I've seen issues with Google's G Suite / Google Apps for Work and Google+. Things like your co-workers avatar being displayed instead of your own.
Yes, they need to fix a lot of things. Also if you use Onedrive online, you are automatically logged into Skype every time you use onedrive. You cannot log out. You can set yourself invisible, but you will be set back to online next time you log in again. It is ridiculous.
Another point is that you cannot use a "work account" you use in office365 as your personal account for OneDrive etc.
My Skype account was temporarily hacked at one point, to the extend that it got disabled it. I still have access to the email associated with my Skype account. I've talked to MS support on this already but for whatever reason, they can't validate my identity to the extend that I can reset the password on that skype ID. Their only solution was for me to create a new Skype account. What other cloud service does not allow reset of account via e-mail validation!?
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.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadI'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.
- 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.
The private account is the one created by you.
If anyone knows the exact difference, please explain! Would be greatly appreciated.
The school/work account is somehow created by a company administrator, but I don't know exactly how or where.
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?
But, ultimately, those licensing rules may be under MS's control as well. Even if they aren't, it sounds like it has a significant impact on their service's design and usability, so it's in their interest to make a change somewhere.
Just merge them into a single collection and have my experience be dictated by that merged collection. With how entrenched they are with the Enterprise world, they should have foreseen this scenario and designed their family of products to facilitate this seamless merging of authorization rules across disparate accounts.
Because user stories aren't: "I want to access my Office365 work account" or "I want to access my personal Microsoft account".
They're: "I want to edit or download a file I have access to in the Microsoft cloud" or "I want to find a file I have access to".
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.
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.
I mean, that is exactly what Google does. Google does allow the change you listed above, which is nice. But if you don't explicitly change your accounts, you keep getting the "pick an account" screen on every single login, just like the parent described, and just like Microsoft shows users too.
Google's UI for it looks like this : https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-_g4V2wYd-SI/VrZF-5K2yCI/A...
Which is very similar to Microsoft's UI for it : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/medi...
Also, when signing up the Google system will not allow you to use the same email (if it's registered) but once you "take over" or verify domain ownership, you can then claim / use that address - which I believe creates this situation.
Then, an admin who proves they control the entire example.org domain registers it for G Suite, and creates a 'crb' user.
You now have a conflict account situation: https://support.google.com/a/answer/7062710?hl=en
I occasionally have to perform some bizarre incantation once in a blue moon to switch accounts when I want to comment on something and then switch back so I can see my subscriptions again.
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.
I use LastPass religiously, but I don't even try to make it work with MS accounts.
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 c...
If you want to know what outlook you have, here's a handy article they made to help you figure it out. Mind you, they forgot about outlook for windows phone, but with that many outlooks who can blame them?
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-version-of-Out...
so the new sync process. go to office.com, sign in, click mail or onedrive. click the group. if mail, click files. now it brings you to a list of recent files as shown on a client served by the exchange server. to get to the correct sharepoint served web client, you need to click browse files in the upper right corner. no dont worry, your folders arent gone, the exchange client just brilliantly collapses the entire structure and shows only the files, in order of most recent. once you get onto the sharepoint server your folders will reappear. then click sync, then click allow, then yes, then sync now. then wait. if i add 30 people to a group, i have to walk all thirty through syncing and following. and dont worry as soon as i train them the sync button will be renamed. my new favorite one. there are now THREE terms used in different spots that all lead you back to the office 365 group team site document library (aka group onedrive.) they include: Open in Sharepoint, Browse Library, and Go to Site. For some damn reason, in the teams app "Open in Sharepoint" is the term used to launch the onedrive group web client, but in exchange its Browse Library or Go to Site.
When you say Outlook account, do you mean Hotmail? Outlook.com? Live.com? MSN.com? Microsoft Account? Windows Live ID? Windows 10 login? Windows phone login? XBox login? .Net Passport?
It's a mess.
Enterprise Architecture teams have their work cut out trying to describe the choices they make.
I wonder if there's a sort of internal fighting for each team to squat on the "best" names for their product or service. Basically a Dilbertian confusopoly [0] where the goal is to make your project sound like "the obvious choice" regardless of its merits, with "Microsoft" on the front as the only way it stops being impossible to trademark.
I imagine other large companies struggle with this as well, although Amazon seems to have taken to the other extreme [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly [1] https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
Branding teams and divisions are getting in the way of coherence and usability. I think ONE of the worst right now is the OneDrive vs SharePoint back and forth. First they were kind of hiding the SharePoint name, and renaming everything onedrive. SharePoint Workspace, formerly Microsoft Office Groove, became OneDrive for Business (because it was the client sync tool, not a server.) Now its making a comeback and certain things are "not" OneDrive, such as 'Office 365' Groups '''SharePoint 'Team Site'' 'Document Libraries''
At least in the Mail world the divide MOSTLY makes sense. Outlook is the Client, Exchange is the server. Yes, the OWA web/javascript client streams from the server and renders in your browser, but otherwise the divide is mostly intact. You NEVER see an Exchange app, and you rarely see the word outside the content of "connect to this server." The SharePoint branding team on the other hand cant handle being the server only and has now forced a SharePoint app that is like some bastardized fork of the OneDrive app. They mostly do the same thing, but not quite. Microsoft needs to draw a line and say "OneDrive = Client, SharePoint = Server" and try and not cross it. The OneDrive web client should be an interface that streams from the SharePoint server to your browser.
I wish they would have left 'Lync' as the "server" to the various clients.
If it's a company domain then there's not much reason to have personal account with the same work email address.
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.
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.
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.
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).
+ 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!
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?
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).
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'.
Strange thing is that indeed, the "save conversations" option is grayed out (unckecked) in S4B, yet we are allowed to use Slack.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13631724
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.
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 :(
Another point is that you cannot use a "work account" you use in office365 as your personal account for OneDrive etc.
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.