How to use Microsoft 365 for Business for both own Consulting business and Personal use

Hi Grace,

Thanks for your reply. Actually you highlight another issue that I have been facing - the Microsoft ecosystem is tightly integrated, yet has support for silos of the product. Is Upload Blocked when accessing a SharePoint resource from within Excel a problem with Office, OneDrive, SharePoint, or AD? Depending on that answer will depend on who you need to deal with at Microsoft...

Getting answers to best practice on setting up accounts would be a first step in my mind to minimize conflicts and be operating within a structure that is recommended...

Appreciate your assistance.

Mathew

This is a bit complex to explain over internet. If cost is less of a consideration, perhaps getting the help of a Office365 partner may make things easier. It is always easier to be able to either show you or explain to you in person (or over a video call) than to try to rely on text.

The first problem that you have is that the personal and business 365s are different systems entirely, and they use different logins that many people get mixed up. To compound the problem, the browsers tend to "remember" your logins and in your case, often leads to logging into the previous 365 (eg Main Biz) rather than that of the other business, or home.

To overcome this, you either use different browsers eg Chrome for the main biz, and Edge for the other biz. Thus each browser maintains the correct "memory" of the account that you use it on.

On your migration, this is what I might do.

Use your consulting biz O365 as your main account. I would assume it is a Microsoft365 Standard or E3 license where it comes with MS-Office on the desktop.

For the personal email account, add it to Outlook desktop and download the mailbox as a pst, then move them to the main account mailbox.

Download all your onedrive files from your personal account, and copy those back to your main onedrive for business account.

Run your consulting O365 and your client O365 accounts off different browsers.

Hope that works for you.

Anyway this is how I do it.

I have the following -

1. A Hotmail account
2. A Office365 E5 (MVP) account for personal use (the license is granted to me as a Microsoft MVP)
3. A Office365 E5 (Work) account for my work.

My Work account is the primary account, as that's more permanent and what I use the most. The MVP account I lose any year I am not re-awarded, and I would probably have to downgrade to a paid E1 of Business Basic.

My MS-Office thus is licensed from my work account. As per the reasons above.

My Outlook is from MS-Office (Work) and has hotmail, MVP and Work emails setup.

My Teams is connected to Office365 E5 (work). I ask everyone who needs me to join their Teams as a guest to invite me via my work email.

My main SharePoint and One Drive is work. I ask everyone who needs me to join their SharePoint to invite me via my work email.

In your case, yours is a bit more complex as you also have another account which you will use as your other primary work. So you have to adjust your use case accordingly. I doubt there is a "best practice" for your situation.

Cheers

Hi MathewFreestyle，

Thanks for the reply from @AnkurSrivastava_3010.

As he/she said, you can move all the files from your one drive personal account to your work one drive.

Moreover, I noticed you mentioned you got conflicts across personal OneDrive/SharePoint and business OneDrive/SharePoint, since we are Office 365 for business online service support engineers, for OneDrive/SharePoint related cases, we suggest you post a new thread on OneDrive category or SharePoint category . The engineers there have more experiences and resources to give you proper assistance.

Your understanding is much appreciated.

Regards,

Grace

I currently have a Microsoft 365 Family account for my wife and I where we have our Office 365 subscriptions and use our personal OneDrives for storing personal data.

I also have two Microsoft 365 for Business Basic accounts for under a single tenant named after my consulting business:

1. my consulting business where i use Exchange, OneDrive for business data, SharePoint for shared business data (my wife also has one acccount for this purpose)
2. my private email domain where i only use the Exchange service

I also do consulting work for another organization where I have an account in their tenant where I access Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint.

I often share resources from my consulting business SharePoint with external advisors to my business.

My problem is that I would like to move all resources over to a Microsoft 365 for Business service where the quality of service and support is much higher than for the consumer services under Microsoft 365 Family account.

My concern is that I already end up in lots of conflicts whilst opening different documents across my personal OneDrive, my consulting business OneDrive (or SharePoint), and the external businesses OneDrive and SharePoint. I would like to make sure that when I move, that i do so in a way that is considered best practice and most reliable, even if that setup is more complex or expensive to setup initially. I am most focused on productivity than cost, but still with complete flexibility to segment between the different hats that i wear between personal, consulting business owner, external consultant for other businesses etc.

Can someone please explain to me how I might best be able to acheive this without constantly running into problems?

Thanks,

Mathew

Hi Mathew,

What you can do is you can move over all the files from your one drive personal account to your work one drive and in that way you would have access to all your files in one work one drive

Is it what you want to accomplish?

Let me know your thoughts

Thanks

Ankur