Corporate users and Live Accounts

[DaveSC]

So here is the situation:
We buy users new Windows 8 machines, We buy them Windows 8 phones.
We create a live account for their corporate email address and link it to their domain account.
We setup this live account on both the Phone and the PC.

Great right?
No... Now the users want to buy apps in the app store but corporate isn't going to pay for them and the end user doesn't want to tie their credit card to a corporate controlled live account. Additionally they want to take their apps with them should they leave at some point in the future.

The way you handle this on Android is that it allows multiple accounts in the play store. I don't see this functionality in the Windows Phone 8 store.

 

[rdubmu]

why don't you have them set up the live account in their name, then add your exchange account separately. I know this is more time consuming having each employee enter their xbox/live/hotmail credentials but then the WP store would be with their own account.

The 2nd thing you could do, if you want to buy an app, it comes out of your paycheck.

 

[crav4speed]

The issue is that accessing the Win Phone Store from the phone is automatically tied in to whichever MS account you create on that particular phone. That doesn't mean you can't create separate accounts though. Users would have to create their own MS accounts and download and install apps manually to the phone.

 

[gsquared]

Have you spoken directly with MS on this?

 

[envio]

why don't you have them set up the live account in their name, then add your exchange account separately.

This is exactly what I was thinking. Once you setup the first account on the phone, that's it. It's the baked-in and is used for all app purchases, XBOX Live stuff etc and can only be removed by resetting and starting again. The better way would be to get your users to create their own Microsoft Account for both their Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 devices and then adding the corporate Microsoft Account as a secondary account, since this will only be used for e-mail.

 

[DaveSC]

The problem is all of the integration. We want to provide people with larger skydrive accounts and so on but we don't want to pay for angry birds.
We also need to maintain control of user that the devices are tied to in the event that the user leaves.

Accounting would likely stop cutting IT Payroll checks if we asked them to micromanage app store purchases.

I would think there is some type of solution here but it's I can't see anything front and center that allows us to retain control while allowing end users to purchase apps.

 

[DaveSC]

I just spent 45 minutes talking to 5 different people. Now they have referred me to live chat.. Getting frustrated.

 

[DaveSC]

Sheena D.: Hello David, my name is Sheena D. with Microsoft Support. Please give me a few moments as I review the information you've submitted.

You: I just spent 45 minutes on the phone and talked to 5 different people. I am growing very frustrated here.

Sheena D.: I understand that you have purchased Windows 8 PC and Windows Phone 8 device for employees, and they are trying to purchase apps for there devices. The only way to purchase apps from the Store on the phone, is to add a credit card to the primary Microsoft Account on the phone.

Sheena D.: If they do not want to add their credit card to the corporate live account, they need to create a new Live account and hard reset the phone.

You: The problem is that we tie their domain to a live account which is john@ourcorporatedomain.com for example.

You: The end users don't want to put their credit card in a john@ourcorporatedomain.com live account they want to put it in a john@outlook.com account. This way they are not exposing their personal credit card to our internal IT staff and they can take their apps with them if they leave the company.

You: In android you have the option to add a second account for store purchases

You: Same in IOS

Sheena D.: There is no option in Windows Phone 8 to add a secondary account for billing purposes. The primary Microsoft Account is the one used for downloading apps and for billing. If the end users are purchasing the apps themselves and would like to keep their investment if they leave the company, then the only thing I can suggest is to create a personal Live Account, hard reset the phone, and then use the personal as the primary one. Then they can use the domain live account as a secondary email account.

You: Then they lose access to their skydrive, office syncing, etc

Sheena D.: You can of course make a suggestion to the developers of the phone here to add this feature: Feature Suggestions: Hot (21177 ideas)

 

[DaveSC]

Microsoft cannot provide any answers. We have been kicking it around here at the office and there doesn't seem to be a way around this.

If you let the users use their own live account and link it to their business windows 8 devices (domain account) then when you terminate that user you lose control of all of the documents that are stored with the live account. The employee will very likely have proprietary company information stored in skydrive and all they have to do is connect another device to that account or log into the website to retrieve it. The IT staff loses all control over this content.

If you don't allow the user to use their own live account and that user wants to purchase apps then they have to use your corporate account for app purchases and they lose these apps if/when they leave the company.

Also some users might have an xbox account they want to link to their phone but they are in the same boat.

 

[Marcos Hidalgo]

Can they download the app to the computer the side load it to the phone?
Sent from my Windows Phone 8X by HTC using Board Express

 

[jason8957]

Prepaid VISA? Reload as desired. That way personal credit card is not associated. Just a thought.

 

[ag1986]

Wow. This would not have passed final review at my firm. I have a selected group of 10-20 users of which at least half are IT support staff to test this sort of thing before release.

Is it not possible to use a secondary account for Skydrive access? I only used a Lumia for a month before deciding that it wasn't for me, personally.

Also, I doubt that the Outlook domain admin can see users' credit card numbers. I am domain admin for my company's corporate Google Apps accounts and I can't, as far as I can tell. I understand that even Google support staff themselves can see only the last 4 digits, card type and expiry date.

 

[DaveSC]

Might not be able to see the cc however users would still lose access to apps they paid for. I have some users with expensive app habits.

 

[ag1986]

Might not be able to see the cc however users would still lose access to apps they paid for. I have some users with expensive app habits.

Okay, how about this. Let users hard reset the phone and add their personal Outlook/whatever accounts. Then, they can create a shared folder between corp account and personal account, or, on their desktop, explicitly share each file in Skydrive. Therefore, the corp account remains the owner of the document, and when the user leaves the firm, access to those shared documents should disappear (if that doesn't happen, MS' vaunted corporate integration is an epic fail - this happens automagically with our corporate Google Drive accounts).

 

[DaveSC]

Okay, how about this. Let users hard reset the phone and add their personal Outlook/whatever accounts. Then, they can create a shared folder between corp account and personal account, or, on their desktop, explicitly share each file in Skydrive. Therefore, the corp account remains the owner of the document, and when the user leaves the firm, access to those shared documents should disappear (if that doesn't happen, MS' vaunted corporate integration is an epic fail - this happens automagically with our corporate Google Drive accounts).

This might work but it's seems awfully "Broken" to have to jump through these hoops. There has to be something that we are missing, after all this is the "corporate friendly" platform and all.

I am a big windows 8 / phone 8 fan but this type of oversight really makes it hard to justify platform upgrades to the bean counters.

 

[DaveSC]

Linked @WinPhoneSupport over here to see if we can get some advice on this.

 

[tk-093]

I guess I don't get how Live Accounts work in that situtation. Even though you create a Live ID that has the same name as your corporate email, isn't that still a seperate account. If you shut off access to their domain account, won't that Live Account still be valid and the Skydrive still exist?

 

[DaveSC]

Yup, that's a core piece the problem

 

[tk-093]

Yup, that's a core piece the problem

So even if you could add a 2nd account so users could buy personal apps, the same issue with storing corporate documents on their Skydrive still exists. So the most important question is how to prevent people from saving documents to Skydrive? If I'm understanding you right....

 

[DaveSC]

I think it's ok if they are using corporate skydrive because IT can retain that information and log in to clear it out as part of the termination process. The problem is if they use corporate skydrive accounts they cannot buy apps or use xbox services from a personal account.

The simplest way to fix this would be to allow account selection on applications like Store, and Xbox. This way you provision the phone with a corporate live account and the user can install free apps. But if they want to install paid apps they simply switch to a personal account in the store app or if they want to hook up to their personal xbox live account they simply switch to that account for that app.