James Callaghan

Login error in Office 365

Login to multiple Office 365 & Azure accounts at the same time

The estimated reading time for this post is 1 minutes

A challenge for most administrators managing more than one or more Azure subscriptions or Office 365 tenants having to continuously log in and out with different credentials to do so.

Login error in Office 365
Login error in Office 365

Many have developed techniques to work around this challenge by using Incognito Windows or Private Browsing and others use multiple Browsers. Even with these methods, you are still limited to using two accounts particularly with Incognito Window or Private Browsing technique.

In this post, I share my method that enables you to log in to multiple Office 365 & Azure accounts in the same browser, on the same device at the same time!

Here’s an example of how many accounts I toggle between:

  1. Corporate Office 365 account (Email, Lync, Yammer, SharePoint, Office 365 Admin etc.)
  2. Microsoft Account for Corporate used for Azure Management Portal, Intune, Visual Studio Online and MSDN
  3. Personal Office 365 account
  4. Multiple Customer accounts (or through Delegated Administration using my Corporate Office 365 account).
  5. Multiple Developer Office 365 accounts
  6. Multiple Demo Office 365 accounts

Sure, a password manager might help with the login process by storing credentials but this still doesn’t solve the challenge of being signed in to multiple accounts at the same time.

The technique I have started using is a feature available in Chrome. Chrome allows you to create multiple user accounts from the Settings page.

Users in Chrome Settings
Users in Chrome Settings

I’ve created users for each of the Microsoft accounts I commonly use. Each Chrome user has its own settings such as the plugins installed, the bookmarks that are available,  browsing history and the crucial part cookies and Browser sessions.

Now when I want to jump between Azure subscriptions or Office 365 tenants I can toggle between Chrome users. The user menu is available in a number of places.

  • Chrome Users - Title Bar Menu
  • Chrome Users - Application Menu

Chrome Users is also available on the PC version of Chrome. I hope you find this technique of switching between Azure or Office 365 accounts useful.

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Comments

6 responses to “Login to multiple Office 365 & Azure accounts at the same time”

  1. maw avatar
    maw

    Thanks, useful. How do you manage bookmarks between these Chrome User Accounts? I’d like all my bookmarks available regardless of which user I am currently signed in as.

    1. James Callaghan avatar
      James Callaghan

      I never needed to sync the bookmarks between Chrome User Accounts as they were typically specific to that user. One way you could achieve this might be to sign-in to each Chrome User Account with a Google account and allow the sync feature of Google Chrome to do this for you. By enabling this, I would expect Chrome to sync your bookmarks from one user account to another, albeit there might be a periodic delay.

  2. granola911 avatar
    granola911

    Just Brilliant!!! I am also a SP/O365 consultant and have been wrestling with logging out/in to different clients accounts. I have been seeking a solutions and, until now, there was none to be found! Your solution is very good, but truly MS needs to give those us engaged in O365 consulting a better option.

    Thanks so much for sharing this!

    1. James Callaghan avatar
      James Callaghan

      Glad you found this helpful – I still use this approach even to this day. The login experience has greatly improved since writing this where now it at least remembers other usernames you have previously. Authentication is hugely important and there shouldn’t be any shortcuts even for those needing to sign-in to multiple accounts.

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