Month: February 2016

So you were just nominated to be the newly appointed SharePoint Online manager for your Office 365 instance and the finance department wants to install a new app for their site collection. Without blinking you say, “Sure, I can do that.”

So you do the usual functional requirements analysis to discuss the app that your finance department wants to use and determine how many license seats you need to buy and then you go to the Office 365 app store and ponder to yourself how you buy a license with your Work ID account.

A Work ID is an account that’s hosted up in Azure Active Directory, the directory that is connected to your Office 365 tenant to manage user identities.

Then it dawns on you that you have to use a Microsoft Account. No problem! Microsoft accounts are tied to things that you don’t associate with a Work ID that’s hosted in Azure Active Directory like a credit card number. They’re also associated with consumer services like OneDrive, Outlook.com, XBox, Groove, etc.

So while you can do everything from the nifty signup page that Microsoft has here in the logical spot in their website…
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/account/

You’ll click there which takes you here…
https://account.microsoft.com/about

Which in turn finally takes you here (sort of)…
https://signup.live.com

Fill out the information required, activate your account, set in your credit card number and you’re off and running. So now that you’ve got that account setup you can use it with your Office 365 tenant to buy apps. So just skip on over to that third link, create your account and get the job done… what are you waiting for???

Note that sometimes if you’re at a public WiFi location you might find that you need to tether your computing device to setup an account somewhere else since Microsoft does limit the number of Microsoft Accounts that can be created per day from a given IP address.

You can read more about these errors over here:
“Why can’t I sign up for a Microsoft account?”