Microsoft Teams will support multiple work accounts, but you'll have to wait a while

By Sean Endicott
published

Microsoft is working on support for multiple accounts on Teams, but the option isn't expected until 2022.

Microsoft Teams PC
Microsoft Teams PC (Image credit: Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Microsoft Teams will support using multiple work accounts on its desktop apps.
  • The functionality is not expected until the second half of 2022.
  • At the moment, you have to log out of one account and log in to a different account to switch.

Microsoft is working on adding support for multiple work accounts within Teams. While the new option is being developed, Microsoft does not expect to roll it out until the second half of 2022. Currently, you have to log out of one account and log in to a different account to switch between them on the desktop versions of Teams.

A request for the new feature (opens in new tab) explains that some people use multiple Office 365 accounts for consulting or other forms of work. This creates a situation in which a person isn't communicating in a business-to-business scenario from a single account but is instead using different Office 365 credentials within Teams. Hopping between accounts can take quite a bit of time if required several times each day.

An official Microsoft response from Alex O. states:

Thank you for your continued feedback, and patience. We are listening and hear loud and clear that you want support for multiple work accounts in the Teams desktop apps. We are continuing our work to support this, including updating our current application architecture to ensure solid performance and functionality. Given the complexity of this work, we are targeting the second half of calendar year 2022 to be able to support this. We will update you when we have a better sense of dates. Thank you.

Support for multiple accounts should reduce the amount of time wasted within Teams. Unfortunately for those who want to use the feature, the new option isn't expected until the second half of 2022.

Sean Endicott
Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

6 Comments
  • Oh man, that's a long time to wait. Phone app flips between them with no issues. Sigh.
  • I swear the desktop client used to do this. It was much like the mobile client. You clicked your icon and a drop down let you select a Tenent. It did essentially log you out of one and into the other, but what more do you want? This can't be this hard. Beyond this, on the web client, I am a guest on 2 other Tenents, not my home. I can switch between them from the interface. Click my information and the menu has "Accounts and orgs", which lets me select any of the 3 Tenents I have access to. What I'd like to see is better collaboration between tenents. Guest access is dismal. I don't know that is not administrative settings within TEAMS, but it certainly isn't obvious.
  • SvenJ, I don't think it ever did that. I've been one of the regular posters to MS about the problems with the tenant locking. They did add the ability to switch between a Work and Personal Teams account, but not multiple Work accounts (tenants). It was only a few months ago that they even put the tenant and option to switch accounts into a new account menu, but you have to sign out first, then sign in. None of this is acceptable for those of us who work with multiple tenants. For us, we need multiple tenants running at the same time so we can receive chats/posts from all of them at the same time. Now, to be fair, there is an easy way to do this: use a web profile for each and install the Teams site as an app in Windows for each profile (as many as needed). That does work, pretty well in fact, but even if you allow notices from the URL, the web app version doesn't show any alerts, no badge on the icon in the taskbar showing you that there are new messages waiting. That one missing feature completely defeats Team's usability for a real-time communication tool, and relegates it to something asynchronous like email. Ironically, this may mean that the fastest way to fix this problem is to update Windows so it can show badges in the Taskbar for web apps. But in parallel, I'm glad that they're working to bring this full capability natively to the desktop app. The desktop is better than the web app in a few other ways.
  • This is, by far, my biggest pain point when using Teams. A valid work-around is using Edge (or other browser) and a different Profile per tenant, but the browser version lacks some of the functions of the desktop application. To be fair, the browser version is pretty good, with my only real complaints being that it's missing the alerts and badge in the Taskbar that there are new messages, and (less important to me) there are fewer options for audio and video during conference calls.
  • This doesn't affect me (yet) but I'm surprised it's not built into the app. Second half of 2022??
  • I've gotten around this by creating seperate local user accounts for work, education, personal. So the work and education local accounts are connected to the relevant O365 accounts. However, nothing is set to auto-sign in. It works quite well for me as it's helped separate out boundaries mentally as a stress relief method. Given during lock down, we were all pretty much cooped up in one space.