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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

291–300 of 490 posts

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

#291
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…

Horrible UI if you can do a fundamental account change without some kind of password re-confirmation.

saved in the browser

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

#292

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…

My son has a personal Windows 11 Lenovo laptop and he is signed in with his personal Microsoft account. The laptop went away for repairs because the touchpad no longer worked. When it returned, it turned out they replaced the main board so the bit locker keys needed to be entered again. These are typically stored in your Micsosoft account only they were nowhere to be found. Some help article on the MS website explained that sometimes it could happen that the keys are migrated to a school account. He only ever used his school account from the Teams app. Sure enough, the bit locker keys were there!!

If he would have graduated or otherwise no longer have access to his school account, he would never have been able to recover the drive. Of course he has his important files in cloud storage anyway but it’s very annoying nonetheless

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

#293
post #175

Over the years, an overwhelming number of services have been consolidated together. Whenever I require access to Office365 or Outlook, I find myself being redirected to numerous domains including msn, microsoft, live.com, and others that I cannot recall. The entire situation is chaotic and disorganized. And then, god forbid you have a problem.

> numerous domains including msn, microsoft, live.com, and others that I cannot recall. Dont forget the og domain, hotmail.com

And their newer, suspicious-looking domains:

1drv.ms (OneDrive file sharing)

microsoftonline.com (something to do with Azure)

b2clogin.com (replacement for microsoftonline.com)

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

#294

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…

My son has a personal Windows 11 Lenovo laptop and he is signed in with his personal Microsoft account. The laptop went away for repairs because the touchpad no longer worked. When it returned, it turned out they replaced the main board so the bit locker keys needed to be entered again. These are typically stored in your Micsosoft account only they were nowhere to be found. Some help article on the MS website explain…

All this discussion makes me glad I'm sticking to local logins for the Windows devices I still have to use. Once that option is gone, I guess that's the end of Windows on my devices.

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

#295
What I find hilarious about this is if you were an Exchange server admin around the time Exchange made the “web” swap from 2007->2010->fully EAS web managed by 2013 the guys like me were following Microsoft MVP articles on re-Hosting exchange for separate orgs on the same active directory infrastructure with UPNs basically the email as the major identifier

It’s funny because Azure seems like it’s just a hacky scaled up version of what MSPs we’re doing with hosted exchange 15 years ago.

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

#296
post #235

Google and Microsoft couldn't be further apart in their login architecture, and their distinguishing of personal and work accounts. Google does an excellent job, everything is unified and sensible. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a mess. It looks like everything is mishmashed together. Sometimes logins will fail completely and you get weird error messages which look out of place in a production environment. Take but…

Setting up family link and kids account was not intuitive noe sensible at all.

Better then ms teams mess, but then again, it would be hard to make it worst then that.

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

#297
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…

I'm pretty sure I did the same thing accidentally when trying to use my university's provided Office365. It bonded onto my personal Live account and was hard and annoying to figure out how to remove.

Same with my spouse when she took a couple of college classes. Which was annoying but whatever until she was done. Then it was annoying pop-ups and alerts every single day because her account at the school was deactivated.

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using same email address is deliberately asking for problems.

I once got enrolled to a school and they asked my email. Didn't know it was for teams access. Now, 4 years later I still get to choose wether I want to login in their tenant or mine everytime. Microsoft solution? Change my email on the personal account. Not kidding.

That sucks. If your email provider supports +suffixes you may be able to work around it that way.

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

#299

This is a giant mess. Frankly, i don't understand how they architected it. If i open a word, excel or ppt document from another companies SharePoint because they added me as a guest, Microsoft promptly signs me out of the desktop office 365 apps and then says that i am using unlicensed office365. How was this missed when designing the security and authentication systems?? This is basic foundational stuff!

I have found guest accounts in general to be barely supported. I can’t manage my 2FA for my guest account in other organizations, can’t control which account to log in with (MS seems to decide based on which resource I’m navigating to), and anytime I have an issue it pretty much takes the AAD admin removing and re-adding me to fix it. It was clearly an afterthought feature.

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

#300

Some what related just last week someone from my company's IT department contacted me about adding my work MacBook to some Microsoft spyware scheme so they could start administering it and he was very stricken when I didn’t want to do it. At start he tried go get me on board with carrots like being able to print - an activity I haven’t performed in over five years. And it ended with “this is our policy” I told him th…

As somebody who worked in IT before and who had to wrestle a bit with policy in the past - I recommend you don't see your work MacBook as your "own computer". Because it's not. The company shouldn't restrict you from doing your job and reasonable and competent IT departments know which users needs what access (including root access) to perform their role, but they do also have a duty to the company and its equipment…

> I recommend you don't see your work MacBook as your "own computer". Because it's not.

This entirely depends on whether the company supplied or paid for the device. Given they're trying to install MDM after the fact, it sounds more likely to me that they didn't. In which case if they want that level of control they should buy their own company equipment.

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