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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

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

#301

Post by gorbypark »

Microsoft auth and billing is infuriating. I once made the stupid mistake of signing up for a trail of Office 365 through an account managed by a company I was doing contract work for. We were developing a Team apps. Anyways, I used my personal credit card for the trial, completely forgot about it and finished that contract. After a while, that company was bought and merged with another, basically disappearing as far as their own infrastructure goes.

The trial ended, Microsoft start charging my credit card, and it was literally impossible to stop it without access to the account that was managed by the now defunct company. While it was pretty hard to talk to an actual person, I did twice, and after months of back and forth via email, I was advised to just do a charge back with my credit card company. Microsoft (probably automatically) disputed the chargeback, and I spent many more weeks disputing the dispute, having to prove to my credit card there was no way to cancel and Microsoft actually told me to do a chargeback. I'm sure I'm somehow banned from Microsoft accounts using that credit card, although I've never tried.

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

#302

Post by Macha »

omnibrain wrote: post #40
makeitdouble wrote: post #17

> It was created when I transitioned my Xbox LIVE account to a Microsoft account on 2014-03-07 (the LIVE account was created back in 2006, and neither it nor my Microsoft account were ever joined to any other domains). Hoping this raised issue helps cleaning up some of the mess, I find it fascinating how bizantine microsoft have become. I also have a skype account that became some other other account, but was using t…

> Or dealing with amazon Amazon used to allow having multiple accounts with the same email, but different passwords. And don’t ask what happens to personal accounts that get accidentally invited to corporate accounts via email adresses formerly used for the personal account.

Yeah, at some stage I had accounts on Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com with the same email. My .de and .co.uk accounts eventually got merged (no notification, just found one day I needed to start using my .co.uk password to log into .de), but my .com one is still semi-seperate and I need to go to amazon.com to manage my kindle ebooks still.

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

#303

Post by Gud »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47
theK wrote: 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"...

Solution: run Windows in a VM, one machine per account, nuke it from orbit when-not-if something goes awry. Hundreds of hours of frustration prevented from a system that is not even able to have the same UI across all its windows.

Even better: Use Wine. I am so tired of running a windows VM.

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

#304

Post by datavirtue »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #100
ccouzens wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or run apps like Teams in a web browser. Web browsers have good isolation techniques like Chrome's profiles and Firefox's containers. Teams is written using web technologies so you're getting the same experience as the app.

The problem is that Windows 11 and above (try very hard to) require a Microsoft account, because these orcas of computing want to remind you with every step that you don't own the device you bought. Hence it's simpler/better to just virtualize everything. Besides, there is a very satisfactory feeling when something doesn't work for whatever reason, you do a quick search and see that apparently you must edit some awfu…

Microsoft auth is the leading cause of newly devised cuss-words in the first world.

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

#305

Post by drdec »

qalmakka wrote: post #160
capybara_2020 wrote: post #24

This really goes to show what depending on online authentication from a large corp can do. Even worse, Microsoft is now trying to force online accounts onto Windows machines. Google already does it with Android. Which means for some reason if you lose access to your email, you are locked out of not only your online accounts but your local devices also. We really need to separate authentication from services and devic…

Don't mix up poop and chocolate - while Google's accounts aren't really that great (the whole GSuite mish-mash of nonsense doesn't really help), they are several orders of magnitude better than whatever MS is trying to do here. You have a million different ways to permanently screw yourself with a MS account, especially since they basically kept all the "account types" hidden while applying over them a veneer of homo…

> You can basically use any Google account everywhere a Google account is required

This is not true if it is a Google Workspace (or whatever they are calling it now) account. Learned this the hard way when getting YouTubeTV. To be fair, it was just a couple of hours of frustration and annoyance but still, for whatever reason, the workspace accounts that you pay for are second class citizens.

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

#306

Post by case »

Kwpolska wrote: post #187
neodon wrote: 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.

This is the way.

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

#307

Post by geerlingguy »

mbreese wrote: post #269

I had the same thing happen to me, just because I was added to the parent mailing list for my kids’ school. I wanted to try an Azure service (Codespaces), but was denied. It took a lot of back and forth with the schools admin to figure out what happened. I was able to get my account released, but I wasn’t brave enough to try what Jeff did. Like Jeff, this did not leave me impressed with MS Azure at all. How could joi…

I'm guessing hosted AD saves an organization $X/month in consulting fees with an added promise that "Microsoft will be able to keep this thing online better than a machine in your building."

It brings plenty of other headaches though.

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

#308

Post by theK »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47
theK wrote: 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"...

Solution: run Windows in a VM, one machine per account, nuke it from orbit when-not-if something goes awry. Hundreds of hours of frustration prevented from a system that is not even able to have the same UI across all its windows.

Yeah, this would be my preffered way as well. I dont use any MS products any more in my personal life or my own ventures but if I would, that would be the way. But this is not a global cure. This probably will work fine in a household or small business environment but there are tons of reasons why it most probably probably will not work in a corporate environment.

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

#309

Post by theK »

ccouzens wrote: post #87
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution: run Windows in a VM, one machine per account, nuke it from orbit when-not-if something goes awry. Hundreds of hours of frustration prevented from a system that is not even able to have the same UI across all its windows.

Or run apps like Teams in a web browser. Web browsers have good isolation techniques like Chrome's profiles and Firefox's containers. Teams is written using web technologies so you're getting the same experience as the app.

Browsers have come a long way in this regard, you are right. Even before containers, I love having a ff profile for work and one for personal stuff, they are ultra portable too.

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

#310

Post by mikub »

roywashere wrote: post #292
gchadwick wrote: post #26

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…

You can also backup your Bitlocker key to an USB-Stick or external HDD. When installing Win11 they even ask you if you want to back it up on your MS-Account or an external device.
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