blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

I am a consultant and I work in the Office 365 environments of different clients. Also, I am not always myself, but I often play other roles using different test accounts. And of course I want to compare them side by side and switch quickly between them. This means that I want to sign in to Office 365 with several accounts simultaneously.

Unfortunately, I can only be one “person” in one Office 365 cloud environment in a browser: sign-in for all Office 365 environments goes through the same sign-in page. To sign in with another test account, I needed to open an InPrivate session, or open another browser. And I don’t have enough browsers to work simultaneously with all my SharePoint Online sites and test accounts.

But recently I’ve learned a trick that allows me to work in all the Office 365 environments I want, with all the test account I want, without signing in and out all the time: with the users in Chrome.

I have a user in Chrome for each cloud-test account combination. And each user has his own Chrome instance, with his own “security territory”, his own history, his own favorites, default start page and everything. I can open them by way of a shortcut on my desktop and start working straight away.

Shortcuts on my desktop to my Chrome users

To set this up, open the settings in Chrome:

Chrome settings

Scroll down a bit to see the users that are already defined. Click the button Add new user.

Chrome users: add a new user

Pick an icon that helps you recognize the user and give it a name; then click Create.

Chrome settings: Add a new user with an icon and a name

Now you can navigate to the Office 365 environment and sign in with the account you need. Click all the ‘remember me’ and ‘save password’ options, set your favorite page in this environment as the default start page. Anything you like, because all of it is limited to the Chrome-instance for this user.

You can recognize the user in Chrome by the icon at the top left. You can also switch users from there.

Switch users in Chrome

Quite a simple trick that has saved me a lot of sign-in/sign-out frustration and helped me to work efficiently in multiple clouds simultaneously.