I use the Office 365 Exchange Online Plan to manage my private email address with my own domain. I also have a Microsoft account with which I have bought my Windows and Office licences.
I want to use my email address (which I manage with Microsoft Exchange Online) for my Microsoft account. However, when I try to add my Exchange-hosted email address to my Microsoft account, I get the following error message: "You can't add a work or school email address as an alias to a personal Microsoft account. Please try another."
I don’t see any good reason why that shouldn’t be possible. I own the domain and if I used Google or any other hosted exchange provider to manage my email address, I presume it would work.
I am being penalised for using two Microsoft services together. I am really not sure why that would be in the interested of Microsoft or its customers.
Alex Simons, the then Director of Program Management of the Microsoft Identity Division, explains why this would be good in a long blog post: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/09/15/cleaning-up-the-azure-ad-and-microsof...
But reading his post, I wonder whether he has actually thought this through. Sure, for large organisations it makes sense to prevent employees from using their work emails for private accounts (but even then, this should be a decision for the IT department and not Microsoft).
However, what about the millions of small business and private users of Office 365? Isn't Office 365 aimed primarily at them? Shouldn't a policy that helps large organisations be restricted to large organisations rather than complicating life for small businesses and private users?
Simplification is good, but it needs to be thought through properly. An easy solution would be to add an option to the Office 365 admin console which allows me to configure whether I want my users to be able to use their emails for Microsoft accounts. Please fix this.
