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Comment by vxNsr | Hacker News Reader

Please make this a reality.

To-Do is a joke compared to Wunderlist. It suffers from the same fate as all MS-built iOS apps: random logouts. I can't convince anyone to use MS apps because the first time they get logged out after an update they just stop using the app.

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And God help them if they somehow have a work/school and personal Microsoft account and don't remember which one they used.

The company I now work for has decided to separate out admin accounts in Windows. Fair enough, except it's not like a Unix system where you can quickly context switch. Trying to administer Office 365 with two separate Office 365 accounts is an absolutely nightmare!

Sorry, maybe I am missing something here. For local admin, I agree re context switching etc. But for O365 admin, we have a similar setup and I admin O365 through a separate container tab or Powershell where you need to connect to Azure separately anyways. Seems straightforward to me.

The company I now work for has decided to separate out admin accounts in Windows

Do they know that doesn’t work?

If you do a run-as then you are as vulnerable to PTH as you would be if you just logged in with the admin account anyway... you need to go full PAW these days.

Could you expand on this? we have a similar set up for our domain admin accounts and I heard it was the safest way to do things. What do you mean by PAW?

A PAW is a "privilged access workstation", i.E. a dedicated, hardened machine just for the purpose of admin tasks. Due to the specialized tasks it needs to run, the workstation can be

- cut off from general purpose Internet etc.,

- a non-mobile device,

- etc....

See for instance Microsoft's documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/sec...

Pass-the-hash is a common attack on Kerberos - it doesn’t care if you are logged in as an admin or have merely done run-as an admin. See https://microsoft.com/pth for more.

For PAW see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/sec... conceptually I like to explain it as a client-side bastion host

Is this somehow worse with MS accounts than with Google or Apple accounts?

People use them less frequently, so they don’t type the credentials as often?

Yeah, I can't even log into my MS account to do MSDN stuff. Microsoft support: "Use any non-microsoft browser". I ended up creating a "personal" and "work/school" account as part of the process, and I think I have to pretend it's the personal account when I log in. I get the feeling I was creating two accounts - a live account and one related to the MSDN side of things, and they are linked in some way. Why...just why? Why can't I just create one account, and don't come up with this specious personal/private distinction. I wonder if they're making decisions on products etc based on what sort of users they think they're dealing with. Personal MSDN customers?

Microsoft accounts are definitely a mess.

I had a Microsoft account from a long time back: me@company.com

Years later the company decides to adopt the whole office365 thing and so company.com is now 'managed' by MSFT for email, etc .... so I have a me@company.com 'company' account as well as the 'personal' one.

I'm sure there are a lot of complicated edge cases around all of this which make moving forward really tough for MSFT without breaking things, but the current status quo is confusing and very user hostile.

Its compounded by the fact that we all had Lumias (I still like the UX over anything out today) and some used existing hotmail/live accounts while others created new ones, even though they had existing ones. At this point they have no idea what they used any more for what and it's often a hassle when they switch phones or get logged out.

On first glance, I would think no.

But in my experience even though I have 5x as many Google accounts as Microsoft ones (across several organizations and institutions) I spend almost no time confused on whether I'm logging into an account that I created, was created for me, was merged with another account, or is an institutional account that was created with a personal email.

I use a password manager for all of them. The only difference I can think of is the UX flow on Microsoft's sign-in page.

Argh. It’s infuriating. I’ve had to start using Office after managing to avoid it for most of my career, and every day it makes me sign in with 2FA on Mac, iOS and the web. For. Every. Single. App. It’s so boring and stupid.

That sounds like an infuriating and interesting bug. Any idea what would cause that across Microsoft iOS apps? Do they just aggressively timeout sessions?

If it's a work or school account it can be related to cache lifetime settings your admin sets on the accounts. At my company it's set to an infuriating two days, so every Monday I have to log back in with 2FA again...

That's ridiculous. Apps should stay logged in for as long as the app is installed on your phone or until you log out/change the password.

This is actually for personal accounts. (Specifically family)

It's not just ToDo and not just on iOS.

I'm a heavy OneNote user and I can't get OneNote on the web to stay logged in more than a day.

I tried to switch to Microsoft To-Do from Wunderlist. It was a very fresh product when I did that, I tried to give it a chance, but it just didn’t work for me. I opened the web version now, and it still lacks something as basic as an “All tasks” list. Oh, it’s still garbage.

(I migrated to any.do and I’m a very happy user of that. Even if they don’t have a true native Mac app and don’t care about one.)

It does this on Win10 apps as well, inside, before, after. "Please log in"

This is the source of much frustration in my use of the Outlook and Teams apps on my phone.

I don't understand what's a joke in to-do? I migrated in the early days of the buy-out, and sure at that time features were lacking. But the app today is at feature par with wunderlist. Honestly couldn't do without the "my-day" feature now that I'm using it, can have multiple accounts (pro/perso) in the same client.

Apart from a basic anti-microsoft stance is there anything substantiating the hatred?

> It suffers from the same fate as all MS-built iOS apps: random logouts. I can't convince anyone to use MS apps because the first time they get logged out after an update they just stop using the app.

If you had read the rest of the paragraph you would see a legit complaint.

Another legit complaint is that you can't see who marked a task as complete in ToDo, while you can in Wunderlist.

But the reason it's a joke compared to Wunderlist is the logout thing, there is no legitimate reason to not have persistent login across updates (at least on iOS) and the fact that MS hasn't figured this out yet is just embarrassing. It's a todo app, I shouldn't need to login in the first place, but if you're gonna make me login, don't log me out.

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