Merge office365 and live accounts that use the same email address

I use both Azure/msdn and office 365
I already had an msdn account mvdl@our-company.com ( Windows Live account) and our company recently migrated to Office 365 which resulted in a mvdl@our-company.com Office365 account.

Wich is causing a lot of grieve when switching between asure web portal / msdn web portal / office 365 web portal

Even when I have no portals open, I cant switch accounts. I need to explicity open the portal that I last logged in to. Log out, and then I can switch accounts.

And having both office 365 portal and Azure portal open at the same time is impossible.

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Marco shared this idea · Dec 17, 2013 · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →

started ·

AdminAzure AD Team (Admin, Microsoft Azure) responded · Nov 29, 2017

Folks,

Thanks for the questions and suggestions. And apologies for not sharing any update on this thread for so long. We’ve been working on this problem and have announced changes on our official team blog (see here: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/09/15/cleaning-up-the-azure-ad-and-microsoft-account-overlap/).

First, we are acutely aware of the UX pain this is causing and we are sorry for this. We are trying to undo a decade and a half of systems divergence. There are literally hundreds of different engineering teams across Microsoft involved in this effort. So this is taking time.

Second, we can’t easily “merge” two accounts, or allow IT to “take over” personal Microsoft accounts. There are two main hurdles: (1) The terms of service are fundamentally different for the two account types and (2) they are based on different technologies with different stacks (different identifiers, SDKs, token formats, etc.). We’re working to converge the two stacks but again this takes time. There are details of this in the blog post linked above.

Third, in the past year we’ve worked with 70+ teams across Microsoft that operate business services but only supported MSA for historical reason. Our goal is for all of these apps to support Azure AD (work accounts) as well. As of Nov 2017, we’re about half way there. Dev Center and MSDN subscriptions (now called Visual Studio subscriptions) are example of apps that now support Azure AD. Microsoft Payment Central and Invoicing are a few weeks away. Volume Licensing and many others are in progress and a couple months away.

The best recommendations we can provide right now are:
1) Use your work account (in Azure AD) to access any work application that supports it.
2) If you had created a personal Microsoft account to access Microsoft business apps, and no longer need it, close the account. Or rename it (which means chancing the user id) to avoid confusion.

Please follow our team blog for future updates on this problem.

Ariel Gordon

Show previous admin responses (2)

started ·

AdminAzure AD Team (Admin, Microsoft Azure) responded · Jun 3, 2015

Our team owns the Microsoft account and Azure AD sign-in/sign-up experiences. We know that some experiences are confusing for some of you and we’re working hard to simplify them.

More specifically:

1) We know a number of users have multiple accounts with Microsoft, some they created themselves and others they got from their work or school. Today, using multiple accounts in Office 365, Azure.com or VisualStudio.com requires you sign out of one account and sign in to another. To address this we’re building the ability to be signed in with more than one account at the same time, in the same browser. This should start showing up on Microsoft web properties later this year.

2) There’s a small number of Microsoft business services that only support “Live ID” accounts, and not organizational accounts that are used for other business services like Office 365. Examples include MSDN and Volume Licensing. We’re working with these teams to add support for organizational accounts. This will allow everyone who already has an account they use with Office 365 to use the same account to sign in to these services.

3) Some users have two Microsoft-powered accounts with the same sign in string: one they got from their organization (when the organization uses Azure AD account) and one they created themselves (for example to access MSDN or VL). For these users, the sign-in experience to Office and Azure can be confusing. If you’re in this situation, the simplest solution is to rename the account you created yourself. You can use another consumer email address or get a new @outlook.com address. And later his year, you’ll also be able to use your phone number as a sign in string. Longer term, we’re considering different options to remove this overlap.

Keep the great feedback coming and please let us know if you finds other sources of account confusion. We’ll continue to monitor this thread as we refine our plans.

Ariel

under review ·