This is a somewhat off-topic post which only applies to Microsoft Partners who happen to use Office 365 and Visual Studio Online. As a Microsoft Silver Partner we have a number of licenses which we’re able to use internally. This includes a number of MSDN subscriptions which can be assigned to staff and Office 365 seats.
Over the last couple of weeks we have migrated across to Office 365 (this was actually done over a 24 hour period as it was relatively simple to move from one hosted exchange account to Office 365). One of the awesome things about Office 365 is that users belong to the Azure AD tenant (ie we have builttoroam.com set up as a tenant and all Office 365 users with an email address of ***@builttoroam.com belong to that tenant).
We’ve been using Azure for development for a long time but as Azure AD is still in its infancy we were originally just adding staff in based on their Microsoft Account. We also did the same for Visual Studio Online. All in all this was quite messy and felt very disconnected. Well today we took the plunge and connected Visual Studio Online to our Azure AD account. To make sure the transition went smoothly we have temporarily added the Microsoft Account for each staff member to our Azure AD tenant – this will mean that in the short term they can continue to access VSO using their Microsoft Account. Going forward we would expect that everyone will start to use their workplace account (ie their ***@builttoroam.com Azure AD account) to sign into both the Azure portal and Visual Studio Online.
Here’s where the issue is. Currently in Visual Studio 2013 you can online sign in using a Microsoft Account (this is fixed in Visual Studio 2015 where you can both sign in with a workplace account, and you can have multiple accounts signed in). The upshot is that the staff will have to sign into VS2013 with their Microsoft Account, and then connect to VSO using their workplace account – this seems simple enough, right! wrong! well partially right. Firstly, we still need to assign the MSDN subscriptions to the staff. After being assigned a license, the staff simply go to MSDN and activate the subscription. This gives them a license to use Visual Studio 2013 which is automatically picked up when they sign in using their Microsoft Account.
The issue is that if they then go to Visual Studio 2015 and sign in with their workplace account, they won’t have access to the MSDN subscription (since it’s associated with their workplace account). The solution is to go to their MSDN subscription details (signing into msdn.microsoft.com with their Microsoft Account) and under the Visual Studio Online section, click the Link workplace account option and enter their workplace email address. After doing this, Visual Studio 2015 will pick up the linked MSDN subscription and license, as well as picking up the Visual Studio Online projects in the Team Explorer window.
The upshot is that after doing all this, staff should be able to sign into Visual Studio Online, Office 365, Azure Portal and Visual Studio 2015 using their workplace account. It’s only Visual Studio 2013 where they will have to sign in with their Microsoft Account, and then connect to VSO using their workplace account.