Sync isn't available for this account

Hey, everyone!

We, here on the Edge team, fully understand the frustrations that come from being told you have to pay an additional cost to get a basic feature. We truly are working on improving this situation, however we have no details to provide at this time.

This thread was originally designed to help out a user who was running into an issue, and I gave some specific instructions here on what he (and others) should do next. This thread is becoming less than constructive in its criticism for the situation, aggressively so, which is against the Code of Conduct on these forums. With that, I'm shutting down further replies to this thread.

If you continue to have an issue around syncing, and meet the prerequisites listed here, please post up a new thread detailing the situation and remember to submit feedback through the browser (we will ask you to do that). We will get around to you as soon as we can. Appreciate the understanding!

Missy Quarry (she/her/hers)
Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

LordDelacroixor another browser :). Firefox is good but so greedy. So I just want to test, but yes, I see the history of thread..I've also opened a case in Azure portal, no answer at this time.

jaykyll You know ... I've been following this thread for some time and I have yet to hear anyone offer even a slightly reasonable explanation for disabling sync for ANY account. What truly astounds me though is that this should be a simple change to enable it for all accounts and yet, MS is clearly REFUSING to make the change.  It's crap like this that REALLY got me considering Linux for good.

Hi MissyQ I have problem to enable Edge sync too.

I have a M365 basic + AIP P1 license.

Error message is "sync is not available for this account".

RMS is activated

Nothing changed in policies.

You can see in my sreenshots in the edge sync setting (edge://sync-internal) this mentions :"disable by admin” or "stop sync for disabled account" and "Microsoft protection service is disabled".

Reset browser, disable/enable RMS, reset profile did not work.

The sync works in past with AIP P1 eval license, so I don't understand.

Can you help me?

Thanks.

MissyQ   Just to clarify:

If you use Office Business Essentials or Office Business Premium,

and you have 1000 users in the tenant,

and you want them all to use sync with the new Edge browser,

then all you have to do is this:

subscribe to 1 x AIP P1 license for $5/month,

and that will allow all of the 1000 users to access sync in the new Edge?   

Microsoft User 

Hopefully we won't need to pay more $'s and that it will be just a case of waiting until the Edge team resolve this issue. Personally I do prefer to use Edge rather than Firefox and Google Chrome etc. I guess we all have to make our own personal choices and indeed how long we are prepared to wait it out though.

For those of you who’re frustrated about having to pay $$$ for sync (!), why not give Firefox a try?  A Firefox account gets you https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ (plus other https://monitor.firefox.com/ https://send.firefox.com/). The browser is snappy, https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers, and telemetry is opt-in and can be completely turned off.  And despite all the FUD out there I’ve never experienced any compatibility issue—at least all O365 services work perfectly in Firefox.  And if you really don’t like it, you can delete your Firefox account in a second and completely uninstall the browser.  (Can we do this with Edge?)

Unfortunately I am going to have to agree with Terabyte. As much as as I love you guys MissyQ, the more things change, the more they have stayed the same. Despite the facelift that Satya has given Microsoft on the PR front, the company is still fraught with arguably its number one worst problem IMO - convoluted and expensive licensing costs. It isn't user friendly and it also makes it difficult for SMBs to use MS as their one stop shop vendor even with a decent reseller. This makes it painful to work from my job as an MS-oriented developer because you end up with in house setups that are fragmented and not part of the entire MS-eco system... I really hope this larger problem is addressed some day. Not expecting it to be resolved here though.

But back to the the matter at hand - the sync issue: hope we can get some sort of clean up on this soon, because as I said before, it's very detrimental to Edge's success for on-boarding from Internet Explorer and as the go-to browser for none IE users at SMBs that are Microsoft shops. The IE users expect sync to be there for them since its highly visible in the marketing materials and the non-IE users take it for granted it will be there since they've been on Chrome or FF for so long. Also, it is hard for my part of being a huge MS advocate at my company to convince people to switch when this feature everyone now takes for granted is locked out because the company cannot afford E3+ licenses for every user.

MissyQ well here's the deal.  No ETA for 365 Business and Premium accounts means 100% of our customers and our employees will stay on a real version of Chromium that supports sync'ing with their Google accounts that they've used for years. This is typical MS discriminating against SMBs while embracing a technology that most enterprises are not going to deploy any time soon.  Enterprises don't deploy new tech quickly while SMBs do it much faster.  Whomever is in charge of policies like this should be fired.

Kevinpclarke Yep, so far it has been mentioned here in this topic, it is the case. The problem is that it is taking a while for such a bsci feature to become available and is driving adoption rate away with SMBs.

Finger crossed this get prioritised asap

[Mod removed - Please don't post personal information on these very public forums.]

MissyQ 

AlexB 

Yes I’m aware of that. I was led to believe in Twitter exchanges the intention is to bring sync to all work and school accounts and includes M365 Business Basic. 

Kevinpclarke with azure P1 or Microsoft 365 premium it already works, so they cannot fix that as it is not a problem. It is only a problem with Microsoft 365 basic and standard

MissyQHopefully this can be changed soon. My organization has a mixture of plans and the majority are below E3. This would help a lot with migrating user settings when they are switching between workstations or being provisioned new machines. Otherwise it is difficult for us to encourage everyone to use Edge as their primary browser when they can get sync out of the box with FireFox or Google Chrome. The general feedback about Edge has been positive though, for what it is worth and we do have a number of users who are using it as their main browser, but this particular drawback is still an overall stumbling block in our long term IT decision making.

Like you said, it isn't ideal right now, but hopefully you guys can improve it in the future. Thanks!

LordDelacroix 

Hi All, 

Before you give up on MS and or Edge, but after some Twitter exchanges with MS I believe. It seems they are going to resolve the sync issue to all paid work and school accounts. Whether this means adding Azure AD Premium P1 I’m not totally sure, but I’m led to believe it will be resolved as it rightly should be.

Maybe the edge team can comment and confirm or deny this please?

kind regards 

Kevin

MissyQ The goes so far into the realm of unacceptable I can't even describe it adequately. What is wrong with Microsoft these days?  Absolutely every product has so many show stopping bugs I can barely use any of them anymore. I've had to format and reinstall Windows 10 3 times last month for the BSODs and today DCOM permission on the runtime broker are jacked yet again and NOW you want me to PAY to sync my account across browsers?  Forget it, I'm just done with MS.

MissyQ looks like its back to Chrome for me....I so hoped this would work, but I am not paying an extra $5/mo.

AlexB Kevinpclarke No ETA, sorry. I have been keeping in talks with the team, though. We do truly understand that this is a pain point for Enterprise users, and unfortunately the temporary workaround does require users to purchase the AIP P1 license.

Once I know these changes happen, I will work to ensure it's posted here on the forums. 🙂

Missy Quarry (she/her/hers)
Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

MissyQ is there any ETA on sync being available for M365 users without AADP1? As it stands, we are having difficulties driving adoption with customers using the M365 basic and standard. 

MissyQ 

Hi MissyQ, Many thanks for taking the time to reply to me. May I ask if it is likely then that this issue will be resolved for users who have Business Essential accounts or is the final Microsoft stance that we need to purchase an Azure information protection P1 Add-on ? 

 I do hope a solution is found rather than asking users to pay more $ per month given it works with free Microsoft Accounts. MS Chrome Edge is my preferred browser, Please keep up the great work you are doing!

regards 

kevin

Kevinpclarke Thanks for reaching out to get clarification, Kevin! Unfortunately, Business Essentials doesn't support account sync at this time (here's the list of what is supported). The team understands the frustrations that users have with this, and a temporary workaround is to purchase an Azure Information Protection P1 license for a single user in the tenant, which is $5/month. Again, this isn't ideal, and the team is working to make that better, too.

Hopefully that helps clarify things for you. Please let me know if you have further questions, though!

Missy Quarry (she/her/hers)
Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

MissyQ 

Hi I’m new to this discussion and I’m sorry to go over all this again, but we have the same issue with our work school accounts. We have MS 365 Business Essentials and are unable to sync our favourites. Using a Free Microsoft account works. 

I did try to follow this long thread, but I’m confused if and what the solution is? You suggest a registry edit as a temporary solution. I don’t mind doing this, but please advise if this is the way forward or if there is a solution to follow or if for a very strange reason we need to pay for premium Azure? If the latter surely this can’t be the case given syncing works with Free Microsoft accounts?

Many thanks

kevin

AlexB 

Agreed, this isn't a very good practice from my point of view, especially since the sync is fully functional for me on my personal Microsoft account but my company doesn't get such a benefit for our Office 365 accounts unless we pay for more. I love the new Edge, but it's hard to encourage adoption when so many people are used to the convenience of FF or Chrome offering such a feature out of the box without having to pay an additional cost (if they do not have E3 or above plans). 

I was wondering if there is any update on dev/canary about including sync of favourites, passwords and other things using Microsoft 365 basic/standard (new naming scheme for Office 365). I'm having a hard time convincing businesses to use Edge as sync doesn't work

MissyQ This is very problematic to not include edge sync with the Office 365 Business Premium subscription. I'm a small business owner and I really feel left out like I'm not good enough for Microsoft. This is so basic. I just want to sync my browser.