Using an office 365 account as the microsoft account on the phone?

[Michael Weisberg1]

Interesting question...our corporate email was migrated over a couple months from internal exchange to office 365. I still have though a custom domain: myname@company.com but it is hosted by office 365, so it should be a microsoft account now...right?

So, when I setup a WP8 I should be able to use that email as the microsoft account instead of a hotmail account...correct?

 

[markfive]

Hi, and welcome to WPCentral!

You'd think so, wouldn't you. But the answer is "no". An O365 account is not a Microsoft Account, for the purposes of Windows Phone (or indeed any of the Windows 8 properties).

So you've got two choices -
1. Create a MS account that matches your myname@company.com.
2. Create a new MS account (outlook.com) and then sync your myname@company.com as a normal Exchange or O365 account (tip: if you use Sharepoint on O365 then choose the latter option)

Option 1 works (I've done it) but it can lead to some issues in getting the two to co-exist (especially if Windows 8 is also involved), and as and when MS decide to federate the two platforms in the future it might cause further issues
Option 2 has the downside that any store purchases will be linked to your outlook.com account rather than myname@company.com (you can choose not to sync the email for that account and hide it's calendars, but there's no control over the store connection)

I used Option 1 for a while and did get it to work quite happily, although I had the advantage of admin/powershell access to the domain. My recommendation would be option 2.

 

[TheArcaneFlame]

This issue drives me crazy!

Like you we have Office 365 hosting our email with our own domain. Same situation. As MarkFive suggested with Option 2, I ended up creating additional Outlook.com accounts to be paired with all of our devices... All of our Windows Phones & Surfaces. I too would recommend that you go that route.

However it's an unnecessary pain in the ***. Especially since you can only create a few MS Accounts at a time through a given IP address. So I had to stagger account creation across multiple days. In some cases creating a few on my work PC and then creating more on my phone until I reached the limit there just to keep the workflow going. And like we needed yet another account to have to manage / keep track of. I really wish Microsoft would make it an option within the Office 365 Admin Console to have your account be seen as a true Microsoft Account for these purposes or just flip the switch on all of them. It just makes so much sense to have Office 365 accounts function as Microsoft Accounts.

I'm a huge Microsoft fan/supporter/advocate but sometimes they just **** me off all the same. If I had to guess, I'd think this is another case of internal Microsoft divisions not talking to each other and not building things which work together in ways that makes sense for real world use. This needs to change and hopefully sooner than later. I would hope that there is some "good" reason why this hasn't been addressed or resolved but it just seems like common sense to do so. If you want people to more readily adopt Windows 8 and Windows Phone in the business setting you should make it as easy as possible for that to happen. Instead we have to jump through hoops to get things to work.

I type this while setting up yet another couple Surfaces with new, "unnecessary" accounts tied to them in order to make them fully functional. *frustrated*

 

[Michael Weisberg1]

This could be a problem. Where I work we are looking at alternatives to ios are it is just not working in a very large scale enterprise environment. Win 8 in a surface or other device paired with a WP8 is a mighty tempting offering. The problem is that there is a whole infrastructure that is already created with ios...namely apple ids. Those of course cannot be ported over to win8/wp8. Since we use exchange/o365 it would be outstanding if we could just use our email accounts to setup our phones....we wouldn't have to create an entirely new infrastructure.

What we are looking at is a surface pro or other win8 tablet that will be managed by domain/ad/gpo...which of course then is tied into a person's AD username. This in turn has their email account tied to it. Hence one big ecosystem all set and ready to go.

 

[markfive]

Ah, if you are an enterprise account I would suggest you speak to your MS TAM about SCCM and Intune before you go much further.

 

[rob45]

I set up a my Comcast.net account with no problems except it doesn't sync like Outlook.com does.

 

[Michael Weisberg1]

Ah, if you are an enterprise account I would suggest you speak to your MS TAM about SCCM and Intune before you go much further.

When it comes to itune...we can do much of that already through our airwatch mdm. We are looking at sccm to replace our aging enteao platform at somepoint. But even between the two of those...how can they be used as a setup for a microsoft account on a WP8 instead of a personal hotmail/xbox account? Is there a way to truly make it an enterprise phone?

 

[Dush Ku]

Yeah that's unfortunate that we can't log into the Windows Phone with the Office 365 account.