Office 365 and Google Chrome Profiles

Office 365 and Google Chrome Profiles header image

Last SharePoint Saturday NL Waldek and I gave a session on Building solutions with Office Graph. As with all sessions we gave we used a new demo tenant and prepare that for our demo’s. I usually prepare my demo’s using Microsoft Office Demos. It is a great way to have a tenant with both fresh content and a set of demo users. However it can get confusing having so many different demo tenants. Now add some client tenants to that as well and you end up with quite a few Office 365 subscriptions you are working with.On the SharePoint Saturday I got some questions on how I did keep track on all those different accounts and profiles. So the following is a quick write-up on the way I solved it.

In order to have a consistent experience I use different profiles in Chrome that I can use for the different scenario’s. This enables me to have different tenant / subscriptions open at the same time. So that way I can check my work e-mail and work on a client tenant without having to log out and in every time I need something from a different tenant.

You can easily create profiles using the Google Chrome Support. In my scenario I usually have a work and private profile and a few demo or client profiles

Google Chrome is currently the only browser that allows for different persons (also called profiles) with their own cookie store. This results in the following folder structure

By using a new profile for each tenant you can check the ‘remember me’ box when logging in, and have all the single sign on experiences you expect in Office 365, including working with Azure. So you can work on your work e-mail while waiting for a demo tenant to provision a new site collection.

The only downside is that some other apps like Visual Studio expect you to be logged in to Office 365 using Internet Explorer. So in that case you still might be required to log into a Internet Explorer for some functionality. Obviously you could use a password manager like LastPass or or KeePass to remember your passwords and use Internet Explorer.

I haven’t had the change to test Microsoft Egde (project spartan) yet, so it might provide the same functionality as the profiles from Chrome.

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