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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

#311

Post by geerlingguy »

alanfranz wrote: post #125
kl343 wrote: post #106

Firmly agree with other posters that Microsoft's identity services leave a lot to be desired... but Jeff is being a bit sensationalist here. The school did not "take over" his MS account. At some point (likely amidst a mountain of other onboarding tasks for his daughter's enrollment) he would have received an invitation to join the school's Azure AD tenant as a guest/external user. In this case, he chose to join usin…

> he would have received an invitation to join the school's Azure AD tenant as a guest/external user. He explicitly claims he didn’t, by the way.

I assure you I didn't (to the OP).

And some people speculate my daughter may have logged into an account on my computer—there is no possible way, and at home she only uses one of two other devices (and at her school they don't have students log in off premises anyways), and my two computers are locked at all times when I'm not around.

In addition, assuming she were able to get access to one of my computers, the password manager is behind face/Touch ID and locks automatically after each use.

I spent a couple hours digging through all the emails we got from her school too, for the month preceding her entry into the school, and I saw nothing about any online logins, not even a link to any kind of portals or anything like that... just consent forms, welcome messages, and the like.

I've been racking my brain for a logical explanation as to why my personal email (and the password associated with my personal Microsoft account—which has been used to login to Azure in 2020, years before this mess) has been associated with the school's tenant. I can't find any.

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

#312

Post by drdec »

bentobean wrote: post #283
Kwpolska wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I go even further. Two completely separate households - one for work, one for personal.

Insert obligatory Severance joke here

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

#313

Post by theK »

Joeri wrote: post #253
Meph504 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the competing software in a business environment, it is pretty easy to see why MS productivity software dominates. For like $12/u/month you get full web and desktop office software, MFA, and AzureAD, which you can use as a SSO indentity provider for free, for one lisc that cost $4/m you can then make use of conditional access policies that give you massive options over how you manage an access all aspe…

Having just been put through the switch from google apps + slack to the full ms365 suite including teams I have to agree and disagree. On paper microsoft absolutely has the best offering. The ms365 suite has everything anyone could ever need. But, in practice it feels more like a downgrade than an upgrade. Teams does everything, and all of it just as poorly. Office does everything, but the web version and collaborati…

> What microsoft seems to lack is caring about user experience as they slather feature layer after feature layer on top of their products.

That's the problem of selling something to the supervisor and not the actual user. MS has had that corporate world as a cash cow for three decades now. They don't care about the end user they just care that their product looks better in the slide that compares it to the best alternative.

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

#314

Post by geerlingguy »

atemerev wrote: post #137

Well, I found that I am mostly using my Linux desktop specifically because it doesn’t require me to obligatory sign in into the services I don’t want to use. Unlike Apple, Microsoft and Google. And also this is why I don’t use Ubuntu anymore.

Apple, fortunately, doesn't require any account signins to use anything that comes out of the box on a Mac, iPad, or iPhone.

I know this because I have one of each running in my home with no associated cloud accounts whatsoever.

They do nag you a bit (not aggressively like Microsoft, who is like "are you sure you want a terrible experience using this computer?"), but it is entirely possible to be productive outside of the iOS ecosystem, which does require an account to load apps.

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

#316

Post by ncann »

dybber wrote: post #275
mastazi wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. It is indeed a giant mess. If you go to live.com and click on the hamburger icon at the top, then under 'Apps' click on the "To-Do" app, you will be asked to enter the password for your work account, even though you are on live.com, not on office.com, and you are currently logged in with your personal account. The only way to get past this is to click "use another account" the…

Same on Gmail. I’m not logged in on my private account as I don’t use it anymore, but it always suggests to log me in on the private account when accessing, even though I am logged in on a corporate account, which is the only one I’m actively using at the moment. Silly.

I don't get your scenario but I have to say I never had any issue with using multiple Google accounts on the same browser. I used to have 5+ accounts logged in at once (personal + work + school) and it always worked flawlessly, switching between accounts was always a breeze using the drop down menu on the top right, and not just for Gmail but any Google apps. Microsoft on the other hand gave me endless issues when trying to use just 1 personal account and 1 work account on the same browser.

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

#317

Post by frankfrankfrank »

I’m not sure what people expect from anything associated with Microsoft. After literally many decades now of horrible Microsoft products and services that never ever reach the threshold (excel possibly being the lone exception), why would anyone expect anything other than abysmal things from Microsoft. It’s what happens when you let a robber Baron type corporation seize monopolistic control and there is effectively not real pressure to compete and get their things in order because there is a cultural assumption based on corruption/lobbying and the monopolistic lock-in will resolve any slight challenges.

I don’t mean to solely focus on Microsoft, but they are the dominant example in their domain and the biggest example in tech.

As a society it should have never been allowed to even be possible that things like the government, including public schools, become so captured by Microsoft’s disastrous ecosystem. People give Apple some justified flak for lock-in issues, but at least there it feels more like Apple trying to keep the horrors of especially Microsoft and Google at bay … formal dress required for entry.

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

#318

Post by Terretta »

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…

Using Edge (Microsoft flavored Chrome) and the account personas will let you keep these M365/O365/Live identities separate, in the same way Chrome does a first class job of keeping Google Accounts separate.

Arguably, if you're one of the 85% of SMBs in O365/M365 instead of Google Workspaces, or if your "Login with..." personal account is Microsoft instead of Google or Apple, you should be using Edge.

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

#319

Post by chazeon »

I remember using Outlook on iOS a few years ago. I had an Outlook account that has a secondary address is a Gmail which i can log in with. Now if I log into that account, I cannot use Gmail with that outlook. This is how messy accounts are handled by Microsoft and it’s why i’m not so surprised by the article.

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

#320

Post by theshrike79 »

We have a similar issue with Google:

Our team has a Google sheet with some scripting that uses the data in the sheet to generate data to another system. This needs to be run using the company Google account.

Now someone opens the sheet, runs the script and it just doesn't work.

Why? Google just randomly decides to pick one of these:

- The personal Google account the user has logged in to - The account used by Chrome - The company account

We haven't found a pattern to this yet. It works better for some people and worse for some depending on the time of the day, position of the planets and maybe a third unknown factor.

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