Microsoft Work or School Account Conflicting with Personal Account

Greetings,

Sometimes a user creates a personal account with MS and associate that account with his enterprise account. Later on, the company he works for start to use Office 365. That generates a conflict. In our example Joe, created a personal account under joe@outlook.com and added joe@acme.com as his account alias. So for the past 3 years he has been use that to login on live.com or outlook.com. Now his company has implemented Office 365 using his enterprise email joe@acme.com and there is a conflict.

The error may arise in different areas of Office 365, here is one example:

It looks like this email is used with more than one account from Microsoft. Which One do you want to use?

Also when sign-in in a browser for Outlook web or other pieces of Office 365 he may see different issues if he does not clear his browser cache avoiding the joe@acme.com accounts confusion.

There are a few ways to solve this:

1. Remove the personal account associated with joe@outlook.com. That should free up the joe@acme.com association.
2. Associate the personal joe@outlook.com with another email like joe@hotmail.com then remove the joe@acme.com alias association

Let me give you instructions on both:

First approach – Remove the personal account associated with joe@outlook.com. That should free up the joe@acme.com association.

In this scenario we are removing the entire MS personal account by:

1. Sign-in to live.com or outlook.com
2. Go to Close your Account using the hotlink provided by MS http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=523898
3. Click on Next and follow the wizard to mark your account for closure.

Note that before to that MS recommends to check an do different steps, depends on what you have on your account like use the money on the account, cancel subscriptions, backup data. They are all documented on this article here – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12412/microsoft-account-how-to-close-account

Note that once you mark your account for closure MS keeps it into a limb space for 60 days just in case you need to restore it and access anything.

Second Approach – Associate the personal joe@outlook.com with another email like joe@hotmail.com then remove the joe@acme.com alias association

1. Sign-in to live.com or outlook.com
2. Use the hotlink provided by MS to access the Manage how you sign in to Microsoft https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=529489
3. Add an existing email under the Account Alias section like a joe@gmail.com
4. Then remove the joe@acme.com to free it up this alias

Now Joe should clear his browser cache, close it. And upon open it again point the browser to portal.office.com or office.com. On the sign-in page he should not see the same email under the Work/School or Personal.

But note that every time he switch between accounts, he wants to sign out as recommended by MS or clear his browser cache

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