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Microsoft Teams to get multi-account sign-in support in December (sort of)

Microsoft Teams is finally slated to get multi-account sign-in as of December 2020, according to a new addition to its Microsoft 365 roadmap. But it turns out it's for a single personal and work account, not multiple work accounts.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor
teamsmultisignin.jpg
Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft has added to its Microsoft 365 roadmap a much-requested Teams feature: the ability to add multiple accounts to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft quietly added this feature to its roadmap yesterday, November 3. (I saw the addition thanks to a post on OnMSFT.com on November 4.)

Microsoft is going to enable Teams users to add additional accounts, change their profile pictures and switch between accounts and organizations through Settings, according to the roadmap. This feature is slated to hit general availability in Teams worldwide -- Standard, Multi-Tenant and Education, along with Government Cloud -- in December 2020, the roadmap says. 

Update (November 5): Microsoft has added a qualification to its Teams multi-account roadmap item. It now says (as of some time yesterday): "We're adding support within Teams desktop to be able to add one personal account, along with one work/school account, change their profile picture, and switch between accounts and orgs through Settings." So this may not be as big a deal as we originally thought. I've asked Microsoft if and when users will be able to sign into their Teams work account with multiple profiles. So far, no word back.

Update No. 2: Here's the latest on this topic.

Back to the original post: Currently, desktop Teams doesn't support multi-account sign-in. To switch to a different account, users have to sign out of one account and sign into another. They also have a few workarounds including using an incognito tab in their browsers to use two different accounts simultaneously. To say this is not optimal is an understatement, and for me, one of my top pet peeves about Teams.

There are hundreds of requests in multiple threads in the Microsoft Teams UserVoice feedback site for this feature, dating back to 2016, if not before. I'm surprised this count isn't even higher, given Microsoft's recently published Teams daily-active user count of 115 million.

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