How to properly solve duplicate upn (private and work)

John Enok Vollestad 6

We have some users that created their own Microsoft account (private) using their email-address from work. In many cases this is the same as the UPN.

Now two years later we have started using our tenant and given the users their microsoft account by their UPN (work).

For the users in questions they now have two different Microsoft accounts with the same UPN. This is of course not ideal.

We have tried to change the email-address of the private account. This did not solve the issue. Have also tried on one account to remove the work-account completely from azure AD, intune and office 365 before we added the user again. This did not solve the issue.

When adding a user to a team there is now two versions of the same person. Only one of them is possible to add to the team
When trying to migrate (to exchange online) a user that we have tried to clean up this way. The user is not visible as the full name, only the samaccountname

We would really like a recipe for the steps to follow to fix this for the users affected.

1 answer

AmanpreetSingh-MSFT 56,751 Reputation points

2020-03-06T11:43:16.28+00:00

@John Enok Vollestad You need to rename the personal accounts using below link to use @harsh.com .com instead of @yourdomain.com.

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=842796

Note: Once the account is renamed, you cannot revert back this change. Refer to https://support.office.com/en-us/article/which-account-do-you-want-to-use-2b5bbd7a-7df6-4283-beff-8015e28eb7b9 for more details.

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John Enok Vollestad 6 Reputation points

2020-03-06T12:03:31.47+00:00

Thanks for the answer.

Does this mean that changing the address to something else than @harsh.com .com will not work? The user we tested with first had the email-address changed to a @Stuff .com address.

John Enok Vollestad 6 Reputation points

2020-03-06T12:15:32.35+00:00

The address that was changed to @gmail.com still have the identity of the original UPN. One have to confirm this address even as one logs in with the @gmail.com address as the login.

Will try to create an outlook.com address and change to this to see if that works.

John Enok Vollestad 6 Reputation points

2020-03-06T12:39:18.647+00:00

Just to be clear. The UPN is only present when confirming the ID at login. It is not present at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=842796

Have read https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12407/microsoft-account-change-email-phone-number and followed the instructions. This seems however to be the login-address and not the identity. Except for the last answered question "I keep receiving the "Which account do you want to use?" message."

After the user have changed the address inside the private microsoft account there is no where we can see the UPN at this account. Still while logging on we have to confirm the UPN as part of the login.

Wonder if some of this have been changed recently and that is why the "normal" recipe does not work.

AmanpreetSingh-MSFT 56,751 Reputation points

2020-03-06T13:16:27.047+00:00

@JohnEnokVollestad-3426 If the UPN is not present at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=842796, you should not get below prompt to choose between personal and work account.

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Maybe when the UPN was removed, its association was not removed in the backend. Have you tried renaming some other account and facing the same behavior with that account as well?

John Enok Vollestad 6 Reputation points

2020-03-06T13:26:05.667+00:00

I should have been more clear on this. We do not get the question that you indicate. This is also the question that microsoft addresses in the documentation we followed. So perhaps this is only to avoid that question and the rest of the issues we have is as you suggest in the backend. Is there any way to access the backend for the personal account?

The reason we are still working on this is because of the reasons in my original post. Duplicates in teams, problem when migrating to exchange online and messages on computers saying something is wrong with your authentication, this might be because you changed your password.

I will probably open a service request with Microsoft office 365. Hopefully they can help on the backend part. Even as the backend in question is in the privat part of microsoft.
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How to properly solve duplicate upn (private and work)

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