Unable to change login account for SharePoint

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MartinCoupal
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Unable to change login account for SharePoint

Post by MartinCoupal »

Hi, I need to login to another SharePoint tenant with a different O365 account. How can I do this? It always try to connect with the account I used with my first SharePoint location configuration.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Unable to change login account for SharePoint

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello Martin,

I am assuming that you are connecting to the same server when you are trying to add this new account yes?
If that is the case, unfortunately it is not possible to have multiple connections to the same server with differing credentials, When the Editor first connects to the SharePoint server a token is acquired and that will be used for login consistently in the future. In order to clear the old credentials, you will need to remove all existing connections to this server (places) from the Editor, then restart the Editor. At that point when adding a new place, the credentials will no longer be remembered by the Editor and it should prompt you for the new users information.

If connecting still automatically works, that means that windows credential manager is also holding onto this information, in which case you will need to remove these credentials from the control panel, before you can add the new information into the Editor, otherwise windows will automatically provide that information when it is requested by the server.

If you are connecting to a different server however, you should not have this issue.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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MartinCoupal
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Location: Canada

Re: Unable to change login account for SharePoint

Post by MartinCoupal »

I'm connecting to SharePoint Online. What I did is used Internet Explorer and logged out with my first user account. Then I logged in in O365 with the other account in Internet Explorer. In PDF xChange I was able to add a new location on the other tenant and it took the current account in IE.

I need to regularly connect to different SPO tenant with different credential. This method is not very efficient. It would a great addition to store different credentials and select wich one when creating a new SharePoint location.

Thanks.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Unable to change login account for SharePoint

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello Martin,

Thank you for that clarification. I have created a formal feature request on this matter, however after discussing it with the Development team leader I cannot guarantee a timeline or implementation of this feature, although in any case it will likely be a long term development item, meaning many months, if not years before we see this. SharePoint has made it very difficult to implement, although it should be possible. Beyond that, currently you are the first user we have seen request such a function, and we are at a bit of a loss for the actual benefits this would offer.

If you could explain exactly what purpose switching accounts on the same server actually serves, we may be able to raise the priority on this marginally (though without additional users support as well it will still be quite low). In nearly all cases, the account

By our licensing paradigm, the only users who should be accessing our software, are licensed users, and most commonly, this means that each user a separate user profile in windows, or a separate PC entirely, it is very uncommon for multiple users of our software to be interchangeably using the software on the same user account. Following that it currently seems highly unlikely that many people would benefit from the countless hours of development time we would need to take away from bug fixing and other more popular features, to implement this.

For the time being, I will have to suggest that you continue using the IE workaround you have discovered to do this switching, or use the method I described earlier. Note that switching with IE is not an intended function, and could be considered a bug, so it may stop working due to other bugfixes we make, and could potentially cause other issues with extended use.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
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BigMike
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Re: Unable to change login account for SharePoint

Post by BigMike »

I guess, that this isn't the described scenario.

SharePoint Online (the Office 365 component) is the "Cloud SharePoint". Every company gets it's own "tenant" in the cloud with it's own instance of SharePoint Online in this tenant.
This has nothing to do with "classic" SharePoint and accessing the same server with different accounts.

There are two possibilities to give users access to SharePoint Online:
a) Create an account for the user in the tenant's (isolated) instance of AzureAD and give this account access privileges.
=> This means a user, which exchanges files with different companies using "their" SharePoint Online instance for file exchange will have multiple accounts (user@tenant_company1, user@tenant_company2, ...)

b) Taking a user's (external) account and giving him explicit rights on the files in SharePoint Online ("External Sharing").
=> In this case, the user can access different instances of SharePoint Online with the same account. This scenario is possible, but probably forbidden for compliance reasons in most cases. (Imagine you have a file exchange with multiple companies and the relationship with one partner ends and you have to search through all your shared files to remove access privileges instead of simply disabling the accounts you created for them. This is much more work and the possibility you overlook something is unlikely higher)

The authentication is done against the tenant (authentication against the AzureAD of the tenant via IE, and therefore logging off tenant_company1 and in tenant_company2 there, solves the problem). I guess it's pretty much like having multiple OneDrive (Consumer) storages with different Microsoft Accounts. [It's exactly the same like using multiple OneDrive for Business storages]

I guess, it's possible, too. I know, you can be logged in in different tenants at the same time, if you use an IE private session to log in into a second tenant. So probably, you need to manage multiple "authentication cookies" for the different sessions.

The (external) user has no choice on the method. It's determined by company policy.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Unable to change login account for SharePoint

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello BigMike,

Thank you for the insight, reading over this I see how it could certainly begin to affect progressively more of our clients as time goes on. I have added your information into the ticket and requested a reevaluation of the priority. As before I still cannot make any promises, but this is excellent information and will definitely help the case.

I realize I missed adding it earlier, but for reference the Ticket number is:
RT#4784: FR: Sharepoint credential management

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Paul - Tracker Supp
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Re: Unable to change login account for SharePoint

Post by Paul - Tracker Supp »

Hi guys,

we've had some pretty in depth discussions here around the challenges presented by SharePoint in this regards. In a nutshell the challenge is in the authentication mechanisms used for SP and how they are integrated into Windows and the application session IDs.

Google Drive for example uses OAuth and classic OAuth allows for every request to contain an authentication token in the request headers.

For accessing SP online (O365-like resources), the IE SDK takes auth token from cookies which are shared per process so whatever connection we create, it gets the same authentication token.

Add to that classic SharePoint can also use NTLM and Kerberos for authentication and things get even more complicated for credential management.

Having said that we will continue to look for a way to do this, but as Daniel has said, there are a lot of more pressing items on the agenda, but the idea is not dead yet.
Best regards

Paul O'Rorke
Tracker Support North America
http://www.tracker-software.com
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