Issues with GoDaddy Accounts and Windows Setup and Whether My Solutions Will Work

Blake Abraham 20 Reputation points
2023-01-13T18:23:00.3066667+00:00

Just wanted to verify if my solution will lead to more problems, and also hopefully help others with the issues I've solved so far:

In my office, we are getting new computers, but running into a big issue because Windows 11 now REQUIRES you to use a Microsoft account to log in during OS setup. In the past we simply made local accounts and then signed into Microsoft through all of the apps individually. This is a problem because we have our company account and domain through GoDaddy (which uses Azure AD), and while in most instances where you have to login to Microsoft, and the GoDaddy login splash page comes up, it doesn't always, including sometimes when initially setting up Win 11.

During this upgrade process, a big goal was to organize things and remove everyone's personal accounts from workplace computers, everyone has a work email and account managed by GoDaddy already, but now using alternate accounts is one of the only possible solutions to setting up new systems! And creating a new Microsoft account for the sole purpose of using it to log in initially is something I'd LIKE to avoid. We have plenty of accounts and passwords to manage already.

Sidenote: We all work off of a server that's in the office. It's just another PC that acts like a NAS, but when logged into Windows with one of the Azure AD work accounts, you aren't able to map a network drive. That's just a restriction of the domain account. The solution is to use a local Windows account, but when I created one and made the account an administrator, the account didn't show up on the login page and didn't work when trying to log in as "Other User" by typing in the credentials manually. The solution to that was this: say the local account created was CONNOR. You have to add .\ before the username for it to work (.\CONNOR). And after logging into the local account, it's the only one that shows up on the login screen (unless you choose "Other User") which is actually ideal for the not so tech-savvy people in the office. Less confusing seeing multiple accounts on the login screen and instead just their name.

Anyways, I tested all of this on my system because when setting up Windows 11, the splash page for GoDaddy did come up automatically, I logged in, and then created the local account no problem. On this other laptop I'm now setting up, the splash page doesn't show up and instead I get the error:

"That Microsoft account doesn't exist. Enter a different account or get a new one."

After some more research, I found out that some people fixed this by removing the secondary/backup/recovery email on the work account and for some reason, it worked. Here's a link to that thread:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/348518/message-says-the-microsoft-account-doesnt-exist-en

But instead of trying to remove the recovery emails from a bunch of the work accounts, I realized it would probably just be better to use the same account login for all of the computers. And against what I wanted to do, create a new Microsoft account for the sole purpose of setting up office computers going forward. Is this going to cause me trouble having all of the computers logged into the same Microsoft account even though everyone will only be logging into and working off of local accounts? And on top of that, this account won't be linked to GoDaddy, so are there any conflicts I'm not thinking about when signing into OneDrive and apps and stuff with the actual Azure work accounts, that will likely give me problems? Any help or insight is appreciated!

Windows 11
Windows 11
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