Adding an Additional Edge Profile

If you are using more than one Microsoft account, it can be difficult to be logged into both of them in the same Edge browser profile.  When attempting to access Microsoft sites or sites using SSO authentication using one of your Microsoft accounts, many times it will use the incorrect account and give errors or other unwanted behavior.

The best solution to using multiple Microsoft accounts is to use a different Edge browser profile for each Microsoft account. The following steps will help you create and log into different Edge profiles and explain how to use them.

We are not going to do anything with any existing Edge profiles that you have on your computer in these instructions, but if you are not logged into your default Microsoft Account you may want to do that to get the full benefit of multiple profiles in Edge.

Adding and configuring the new Edge profile:

1. The first thing we are going to want to do is to make a note of what your primary/default Edge profile is named as we will need this information later.
2. Click the profile icon in the top left-hand corner and make a note of the name beside the icon.
3. Now that you have made a note of this, follow the menu in the screenshot below to set up a new Work or school profile.             
4. Click the sign in button to sign into the new Work or school account you want to use this profile with. 
   • Please note, we just created this profile, and it is completely empty, so nothing from your machine will be synced to the cloud in this Microsoft account. You can also turn off any or all of the syncing for this profile before we are finished if you would like as well, I will show you where to do this. 
5. The next screen you will be taken to will give you the opportunity to change what will be synced with your account in the cloud, if you would like to make any changes click manage.
6. Once you are finished click Apply and then Confirm and continue.
7. The next screen took take a few moments to complete, once you see the blue button appear you can click continue and progress through the rest of the screens.
8. Now that you have set up this new Edge profile, we want to make a few changes to the settings so we can utilize these profiles how we intend to use them with the multiple Microsoft accounts.  Click the profile icon at the left top of Edge again and click the settings icon to get into the settings for this profile.
   • A couple things to note in this screenshot:
     • you will see the name "Work" just above the email address of the account you just logged in with (it may say something different for you, but I make note of this because one of the things we are going to change is this name)
     • You will also see the name "Default" down lower in the screenshot (or whatever the name of your primary Edge profile is) 
9. Once you click the settings icon, you will be looking at the settings for this new Edge profile. We are going to make a couple of changes to use this profile and Edge profiles in general to help us work much easier with multiple Microsoft accounts.
10. Let's start by changing the name.  Click the edit button and then name the profile. I personally prefer to use the email address as the name, but you can name it whatever makes sense to you.     
11. Next, let's go to the Profile Preferences
12. Turn on the option to "Automatically sign in to the sites with your current work or school account" and for "Default profile for external links" choose the Default profile - the is the one we made a note of in steps number 1 and 2.
    • This second option for "Default profile for external links" will allow your current default Edge profile to continue to be the profile to open when clicking links in Outlook, Teams, and other applications on your computer.  Forgetting to set this to your default profile can make Edge work in a way that can be confusing unless you know exactly what it is doing. 
13. We are finished creating and configuring the new Edge profile.

Using the new Edge profile:

In the last step we set the preference for the Default profile for external links. The reason we did this is so that links anywhere on your computer will continue to open in your default Edge profile.  This is so this new profile is not used unless you intentionally want to use it.

When you want to open any site using the Microsoft account you set the new profile up for, all you need to do is click the profile icon in the top left corner of the Edge browser. You will then see the name you gave the profile in the menu that pops down.  Simply click on that link and it will open that Edge profile.

If you have any trouble or have questions, please let us know at help@nacintl.com