Forum Discussion
Retiring my own Entra tenant: how can I preserve my existing Tech Community profile?
Keep the tenant active until you’ve spoken to the Tech Community team. A personal Microsoft account is a different identity, even if it uses the same email address, so don’t assume it will open your existing profile.
There isn’t a self-service account-linking option I can point you to. Contact Tech Community support or a community manager while you can still sign in, provide your profile URL, and ask whether they can change the login associated with that profile while keeping its history and private messages.
The consent screen alone doesn’t tell you whether a new profile will be created. If support can relink the account, test the personal-account login before deleting the tenant. In the meantime, save anything important—especially private messages. I wouldn’t assume a full profile export can later be imported into a new account.
Keep the tenant active until you’ve spoken to the Tech Community team.
Microsoft retired free E3 Developer license which I have been using for much more than a decade; I am using the trials to buy time for migration but would avoid having to pay for a license to wait for MS to answer.
I know perfectly that email addresses do not identify an (Entra ID) account, only the ID is the unique identifier.
What questions me, as a European Citizen, is that GDPR grants a right to rectify personal data (art. 16) so it would be perfectly legitimate, and MS by law abide to that, to ask to have the email address here in my community profile updated. How would MS act in that case, especially if the new email address isn't linked to any MS account?
You are correct assuming profile can't be exported (or imported) : we are technically locked in exclusively because of a MS choice: there is no technical reason to require that as proven by hundreds of thousands of online communities that can work with a simple email or mobile phone number.