The `joys` of a personal and work Microsoft Account with the same login, plus Dell in the mix . . .

[britechguy]

Had a client today with an ancient laptop (Win10, 8GB RAM, i7-6th Gen, hybrid SSD/HDD) who bought a new computer, and also had another, both laptops.

He thought he had Microsoft 365 on that ancient one. But he didn't. At one point or another Dell (and all the machines are Dell) sold him Microsoft 365 Apps for Business, while at the same time creating a MS work account with the same email address as login and a custom domain. This subscription is set to end (or auto-renew, more accurately) at the end of this month and it makes no sense for him to have anything other than M365 personal.

I could never figure out how to get in to his Microsoft work account. I tried the old trick of switching the primary alias for the personal account, thus divorcing it from the email address used for the work account, but even that wouldn't do it. Finally, we were able to reach Dell and get them to stop the auto-renewal of M365 Apps for Business.

I got M365 Personal installed on the ancient laptop as well as the two newer laptops under the same personal account, and the data from the ancient machine was syncing to OneDrive (there was over 135 GB to sync) when I left. The other two machines were done with their respective syncing before I was ever able to get M365 on the ancient machine and working. I expect this sync will take many, many hours to complete, but at least its in progress.

I haven't had this kind of a mess with a home user and M365, ever. The whole offer from Dell where he got M365 Apps for Business really added strings to the Gordian knot of this situation!

 

[Sky-Knight]

All of this? Multiply it by 10 and you're close to the damage Godaddy does when they sell M365 to anyone.

But yes, people that sell that product incorrectly are a source of documentable harm, and should be treated accordingly.

I'm willing to bet the customer did it to themselves with a tick box on an add-on offered while buying. It's all extremely unfortunate.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

My experience has been....they should be able to co mingle. And I say that not only from seeing it on many clients, but...my personal experience also. I have a "personal Microsoft account"...that uses my work email address. That I created going way way back to...oh, probably pre 2000 years...from whatever Microsoft personal email and messenger services were used back then. And I have my "work Microsoft account"...that was created the first year Microsoft Office 365 came out. Also with my work email address of course.

If you have both personal and work accounts with Microsoft using the same email address....when you sign into a Microsoft online service, Microsofts authentication servers should recognize that and present this choice to you.

And you choose the correct one. For both myself, and...clients of mine that I see this one, this works smoothly.
I can log into my work account for my office apps, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive. I also can log into my personal OneDrive. They can co-exist on my computer...personal OneDrive is a gray cloud icon, work OneDrive is blue. They both show up fine in Windows Explorer. You can actually "engage" multiple OneDrive accounts from multiple different work and personal concurrently.

It's just a matter of keeping the passwords sorted of course, knowing which is which. And I'm sure a lot of clients might only "guess".....they won't know for sure.

Yes it can get sticky, we really focus on only supporting the business accounts because...we manage those for our clients. And of course prefer them to just ...use that one...not mix them up on the office computers because...they may not be sure of their personal accounts creds thus it messes up, and we're not in charge of their personal accounts and don't manage them.

In troubleshooting a computer not behaving well with this, I'd be clearing out "Credential Manager"....so you can start over fresh with logins of the two Microsoft online services. I bet one of those was caching the incorrect creds.

 

[britechguy]

My experience has been....they should be able to co mingle

I have seen exactly the dialog you present when there's comingling, and I've also seen what I got yesterday, which is a standard online login dialog from https://myworkaccount.microsoft.com/ where this is the first thing that comes up:



and, after entering the "comingled address" and before a password can even be entered, this comes up:



This is all that I could get yesterday. The opportunity to even get to the stage where that email address was recognized as a work account, even when using the "official work account portal" never materialized.

It's freakin' maddening.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

And if you just go to...OFFICE.COM Nothing in front. Any difference?

 

[britechguy]

@YeOldeStonecat

I just went to office.com, entered as office.com. Hit the Sign In control at the upper right of the screen, and went through the entire login process. That takes me into the personal account, and that's the only thing it's ever taken me to.

I've not had any issue logging in at all for the personal account. At one point I even changed the primary alias to a junk gmail address of mine, removing the comingling/conflicting address, just as the dialog you presented suggests, then tried logging in for the work account the work portal afterward. No dice that way, either.

Since Dell has said they will take care of nuking the auto-renew that's coming up at the end of this month on the M365 Apps for Business they sold him, we're pretty much fine. He never used that other account. I firmly believe he had no concept that it was "another account" since the same login ID in the form of his email address was involved.

I've just changed his personal Microsoft Account back to having his email address, and only his email address, as the primary alias.

Now it's the fun of trying to get him to wrap his head around what OneDrive cloud storage is and how it works. I have trouble doing that even for many tech savvy individuals, but for home users, ugh.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Odd on for sure.
Incognito browser tried by chance? While I certainly get the "confusion" of the end user....MS personal acct, MS work acct...same email address....who knows if they know the password for either....it still should work. Granted...end user pebaks in the way.