I’ve encountered a strange situation. Some time ago I set up a Microsoft Small Business Live (I think it was called) account, which, a year ago or so, morphed into Microsoft Office 365. The changeover to Office 365 involved, among other things, setting up an Exchange account for email, using of course the same email address I had with Small Business. Let’s call it myname@mydomainname.com. I had also signed up, a few years ago, a Windows Live account using the same email address, and was using Live Mesh and subsequently Skydrive. So I have document storage under Skydrive and more document storage under Office 365. It seems that my Office 365 and my Live accounts are unaware of each other’s existence, even though they use the same email address and the same password (I had to use the same password because I had all kinds of conflicts signing in to one or the other account if they didn’t have the same password.)
I’ve never used Windows Live for email, but the other day I discovered that I had an Outlook.com account under Windows Live or Microsoft Account or whatever it is now. In other words, I have two separate email accounts using the same email address and password. If I open my Outlook.com window at myname@mydomainname.com(Windows Live) and send an email to another address, like the yahoo.com address I’m using for the Lounge, and then reply to that message, the reply goes to myname@mydomainname.com(Office365), not to the mailbox it originated from. Can anyone explain this situation?
Potentially more seriously, if I install Windows 8 or buy a Win8 computer and establish myname@mydomainname.com as my Microsoft account for that purpose, what kind of a mess am I in for? Which of the two accounts of the same name is it going to use? And if it decides to use the “Windows Live” account, is that going to compromise my ability to use Office365? Given the difficulties I had when I used different passwords for Office365 and WindowsLive, I foresee all kinds of problems here and would like to prevent them.
(It was hard to figure which forum to post this on, since it involves so many factors. If an administrator thinks it would be better in a different forum, feel free to move it.)
Fafner
Post edited for clarification: I should make clear that, by “Office 365,” I’m not referring to Microsoft’s subscription-based method of marketing the latest Office suites. In its infinite wisdom, Microsoft seems to like to call different products by the same name. I’m referring to the kind of account described here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/what-is-office-365-FX102997580.aspx
