Help me make sense of my multiple accounts in Teams (free)

Copper Contributor

I would need some help to understand the different accounts I have access to through Teams. Although I am a fairly frequent and experienced user of internet based applications, I find the accounts in Teams to be very confusing. 

Here's the situation:

 

1. I am a freelance worker, not belonging to any organisation, and I don't have any paid account for Office 365.

2. I use only one single email for all logins (and I would expect to be one single user in all situations, but that doesn't seem to be the case). 

 

3. As a user in different situations I see four different Teams accounts: One that seems to be a private account (A), one that I seem to have created for my one-person company (B), one where a friend has set me up as a user in his company's Teams account (C), and one where I am registered as a guest at a client's company (D). 

 

4. At login, I am asked to chose between a "personal account" or "work or school account".

 

5. Let's use "personal". On my Iphone I am presented with all four accounts above (A, B, C, D). I can switch between A (called "personal"), B (called as my name), and C, all without using passwords (though switching is painfully slow). In order to access D, however, I am asked to put in a password. On my desktop the situation is similar, although there are only three accounts visible. The first is called as my name — and I don't know whether it is A or B! Then there is C without using password, and D which is accessed with a password as on the Iphone.

6. Now let's use "work or school account". I am now offered to choose between the same accounts as above, however, I only have access to account D. Trying to access the others on my Iphone I get a message that I don't have access. On my desktop on the other hand, the application tries to access the other accounts, and only after at least a minute (!) I am told that I don't have access. 

I find this all extremely confusing and not very user friendly.

Firstly, I would like to have only one single personal account (instead of A and B – and maybe this is the case, although from the Iphone accounts view it seems to be two different accounts).

Secondly I would like to access all different teams from this single account. 

Thirdly—I think that I have used One Drive to store an uploaded Powerpoint presentation at one point, but I don't have a clue about where I could access this One Drive space from all these different accounts. Obviously, I would like to have one single One Drive that I can access from my one single account. 

As a comment: It all seems to me that Teams was developed for people working in different teams inside one organisation only, not collaborating in teams outside this organisation. I think is an outdated view on how work is being done today, and on how work will be done in the future. 

But the only thing I would ask at this point is to get help in order to make sense of my Teams accounts. 

 

3 Replies
In your case I believe you will always be choosing Personal account. The only time you use Work or School is for tenants with paid licenses. It is very confusing sometimes because they are really all Microsoft Accounts. Just that one is the Free End user type of account that may be associated to Outlook.com, Live, Hotmail, or any of the other Free Consumer type of service and the Work or School which is also a Microsoft services account, but it is a licensed or paid type of Microsoft account.
It gets even more complicated if a Person has a Paid Microsoft Office account that they then try to use along with Teams in either the Free Teams or the Paid Teams.

@Forrest Hoffman Confusing indeed. To say the least. But what about the two different accounts in my name—one personal, and one seemingly for my (one person) company (but still free)—that I see in my Iphone? Are they two different accounts? And could I delete one of them?

I have a vague idea that the second account in my name might have been created when I accepted the guest invitation from a client's company which is a tenant with a paid license (I just remember that it was a fairly long and confusing process to accept the invitation, where I had to register again and choose a new password). But I might be wrong about that.

In that case, however, deleting that account might disconnect me from the client's guest account?

 

 

If the one you set for your company uses a different domain email then it is really a separate Microsoft account and would have a different and separate experience than the other Personal one not associated to the company.
In my opinion, this all started when Microsoft had their Passport service that allowed you to have one ID to authenticate to all the Microsoft services. They let other domain accounts be used for a Passport account. So Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, Live.com etc. can all be used to create a Microsoft (Azure) account now.