Hi, We are able to sign up Microsoft Tech Community using personal Microsoft Account and Microsoft tenant like Microsoft365 Azure and so on. The issue is when you login with tenant account and for any reason like change your company, then you will lose access to your Microsoft tenant account. However, when you sign up with Microsoft Account, then you could always keep that account and you may add tenant account and remove it later like when you change tenant and so on.Personally, I believe it is recommended to sign up with Microsoft Account to Microsoft Tech Community, so you could keep your account forever. What do you think ?

HotCakeX Reza_Ameri Dean_Gross Thank you all for the robust discussion and I think you're all talking about the correct issues, let me take a moment to explain why things are the way they are (without making an argument for them continue to be that way). The Microsoft Tech Community grew out of the old Office 365 Network Yammer group, back then we focused exclusively on products that were in the Office 365 Product group and at products aimed entirely at enterprise. Indeed even today I work for the Office Marketing team. When you're focused on Enterprise you quickly learn that some employers want you to conduct business, i.e. speak to partners and stakeholders, on accounts that they own (indeed some employers have it in their terms of employment that you must). This means if you are given access to a special area through your work or sent documentation that might be privileged or confidential and then leave the company you will lose access to this information / data. This is why we support login via Azure Active Directory. So all that said why can you not take your account with you? well its because the account, created via AAD and your employer, doesn't actually belong to you and we can't give you access to it because it does not belong to us either. In data protection speak we are merely the 'data processors'(1) if we migrated that data to your personal account we could be seen as stealing data from your former company. So why support it? simply put we want to ensure that people can engage on the Microsoft Tech Community via their work account if they have to and their personal account if they want to. In this way those that have to use work accounts can, while those who wish to use personal accounts can do so as well. We have, in recent months, considered if we need to enable login with Social Media / Git Hub but the jury is still out on that one. Could we hybrid login? where by a user can connect a AAD account and a Personal account? possibly but this becomes very complex, i.e. we would need to find a way to sanitize this hybrid account of anything that belonged or could be seen to belong to the employer. This could include Private message, Subscriptions and even posts. Needless to say all this would require infrastructure for those companies to notify us, manually or via AAD Signals, of users leaving so that the appropriate updates could be made and then some sort of review done to make sure all appropriate data was removed. Also what happens if we remove something that you think belongs to you but your employer feels it belongs to them? In my mind a hybrid account is veritable minefield of complexity, the overhead for which probably means it isn't worth what would be left of the account afterwards. Today if you leave a company you only lose access to the account purely because you can no longer login with it, assuming you or someone authorized by your company does not come and manually close the account, the account itself still exists in our system. I am not sure what the 'solution' needs to be for this but I hope from my intervention today you have gained some understanding into why its the way it is. Happy to continue to engage with this discussion as I do understand the frustration users have when this happens to them. Allen

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.Here is the situation I observed, when you sign-in with the work account , then you are unable to switch to MSA or personal account and when you leave the company or you are moving to another company then practically you will lose your account.However, in case you sign up with a personal account or MSA, when you join a company you could still add the tenant account and you may use it. Then once you left the company , you could just remove that account.

Dean_Gross Agreed, I believe the team need to change the design like ask users to sign up with Microsoft Account and add their personal account later on. It is common for people to join and leave companies and therefore their Azure AD will change and imagine they had participations in the forum and they have to start from the scratch.

Reza_Ameri you are correct, don't use your work account to join communities like this.

I think it's better to use personal account if the things you want to talk about is personal, but work accounts can be setup too for organizations if the person is acting on behalf of a company.so it's not like never use work account, it all depends on the situation.

Sign up with Microsoft Account vs Microsoft Tenant ?

HotCakeX
MVP
Feb 21, 2021
I think it's better to use personal account if the things you want to talk about is personal, but work accounts can be setup too for organizations if the person is acting on behalf of a company.
so it's not like never use work account, it all depends on the situation.
- Reza_Ameri
  Silver Contributor
  Feb 21, 2021
  Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.
  Here is the situation I observed, when you sign-in with the work account , then you are unable to switch to MSA or personal account and when you leave the company or you are moving to another company then practically you will lose your account.
  However, in case you sign up with a personal account or MSA, when you join a company you could still add the tenant account and you may use it. Then once you left the company , you could just remove that account.
  - HotCakeX
    MVP
    Feb 21, 2021
    You're welcome,
    yes I know how it works, recently one of the MSFT employees left the company for another job and their account was deleted.
    it's fair, when you leave a place, you don't want leftovers stay there.
    
    so it's neither good nor bad, just depends on the situation and what the person decides to do.
    
    this community is not the only service that gets deleted when changing company.
Dean_Gross
Silver Contributor
Feb 20, 2021
Reza_Ameri you are correct, don't use your work account to join communities like this.
- Reza_Ameri
  Silver Contributor
  Feb 21, 2021
  Dean_Gross
  Agreed, I believe the team need to change the design like ask users to sign up with Microsoft Account and add their personal account later on. It is common for people to join and leave companies and therefore their Azure AD will change and imagine they had participations in the forum and they have to start from the scratch.

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Sign up with Microsoft Account vs Microsoft Tenant ?

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