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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

181–190 of 490 posts

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

Because as someone who has done support for a 28000 person organisation, 27500 of which are using mostly Microsoft products on windows for 90% of the time and 500 of which are using Mac or Linux and doing other stuff I can tell you that at least 50% of the security incidents and second line support issues came from those 500 users.

This seems like a clear case of selection bias. People with Linux and Mac are probably devs and technical people who will obviously utilize a much broader range of functionality of their machines and thus encounter more edge cases.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#183
post #154

Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. When I was a city councillor I had a corporate O365 account from the council (used for council email and virtual meetings over teams) and simply trying to sign out of the thing or switch to another account was always fraught (I've got a personal account that's basically just to associate my windows license with and a work account used for azure access). You'd often end up in a s…

I have the same experience! In my case, my personal and professional Microsoft addresses are the same (same email, different accounts) which means that in many cases I end up in impossible situations when the login screen doesn’t correctly guess if I want to sign in personal or with my “work” account. I also do client work for organisations where I need to sign into their O365 and honestly the only way to manage all…

Using same email address is deliberately asking for problems.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#185
post #115

My suspicion is that what's happened here is that Jeff's daughter has used his laptop for something from school and clicked straight through an overly-inviting message that asked to join the account to the school's domain. I'm skeptical of the suggestion that the school admins were able to do this with no input, but I'm absolutely willing to entertain the idea that: a) AD login is a complete mess, and b) the UI is ut…

This makes sense, but this should had ask the account password to confirm, which Jeff’s daughter may know and typed.

IMO, The main issue in here is BigTech obsession with a single login. One single credentials give you access to everything, from entertainment to professional services.

People do share their credentials with family, specially if involves subscription and payment. BigTech try so hard to push for not sharing, but they fail to understand (or don’t care) that most people, specially non American, don’t have the budget to subscribe multiple time. Family accounts are non existent, lacking management options, and also more expensive.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#186
post #3

Microsoft's organisation vs use of accounts is certainly a hot mess.. I'll be watching responses here and hopefully find out why my personal account sometimes says certain settings are managed by "my organisation". What freaking organisation is always my response; I've never been able to figure it out.

It probably isn't actually "your organization". Some MS products just use that as a generic "this is disabled in some config or the other", (perhaps correctly) assuming that in most cases, it actually is turned off by the organization. Very random example: SharePoint has a MS Word integration - you can open a .docx file from there, it opens in Word and you are actually able to edit the file on the server as if it was…

By the way if you are installing google chrome with linux packages, it says the same. It frightened me at first I was like, whose organization is managing my "google-chrome" install? Then realized my organization was just the root account on my linux vs installing chrome a different way (flatpak, manual install in homedir).

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#187
post #108

Am I the only one who uses browser profiles to separate my personal browsing from work or other organizations I'm a part of? When I mention this approach to people they give me a strange look like I'm crazy. In Chrome you just create a new profile for each identity you have. If you're opening random incognito windows or using different browsers all the time to log in with different identities, you should be creating…

I go even further, corporate laptop for work, personal laptop for personal stuff.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#188

My kids' school and high school use Teams for some stuff. I have to use it occasionally for work too. The thing is that's nigh impossible to simply log out as one user and back in as another, so we have to take a lot of care of who used this or that device last. And don't get me started on the nightmare that is dealing with Minecraft accounts older than the Mojang acquisition. It's not only Microsoft. Trying to subsc…

To solve the Teams stuff, couldn’t you just use separate OS accounts?

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#189
post #115

My suspicion is that what's happened here is that Jeff's daughter has used his laptop for something from school and clicked straight through an overly-inviting message that asked to join the account to the school's domain. I'm skeptical of the suggestion that the school admins were able to do this with no input, but I'm absolutely willing to entertain the idea that: a) AD login is a complete mess, and b) the UI is ut…

> an overly-inviting message that asked to join the account to the school's domain

The UI of this is just as bad as the one that asks you to sign into MS account and upload all files to OneDrive when setting up Windows. It even comes back after some time if you deny it!

AD login is something that used to work well (10-20 years ago) but is now a complete clusterf*k. What was designed for logging into Windows NT workstations isn't what most users nowadays are expecting when logging onto web apps. Plus the UI full of antipatterns. Yet it's still the easiest for IT folks to manage.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#190
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

Try and talk the C-suite and Accounts people at $NonTechBusiness into using LibreOffice or Google Docs instead of Excel and Outlook and let me know how you go.
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