Colin Phillips (Alumni)
Recently I was using Office 2016 to save to a new location that I’d never saved to previously. Unfortunately, it turns out I was already connected to a large number of services (as I work as a consultant and am often working on many projects at once). Before I could connect to a new service, I had to first disconnect from an existing service.
Now, I can’t understand why there’s a limit to the number of services you can connect to (or why the limit is so absurdly low), but the problem remains, and as such, I had to remove one of my office connections.
To demonstrate, I was seeing the following error message.
In order to resolve this, you first need to go to the File menu (note that you can do this Word, OneNote, Excel, it doesn’t really matter, they’ll all work).
Then choose the “Account” tab on the left, and under the heading “Connected Services” you’ll have to decide on a service you wish to disconnect.
By clicking “Remove” above, you’ll get prompted for confirmation before the connection is severed.
That’s all there is to it. Once you’ve disconnected the service, you can then connect to a new service.
This is hardly a ‘fix’. As more people start running multiple O365 for their collaborative inter-relationships this is starting to increase support calls and end user problems which has already seen one client kick O365 into touch. Not to mention finding myself the brunt of valid criticism of such unforeseen threshold limits from clients.
Is it the case that Microsoft has not considered multiple O365 profiles on a single desktop very well or in their Office Products. This OneNote issue is symptomatic of threshold issues that should simply not exist, or at least have flags we can flip to electively increase them even.
On Mac OSX its even worse, with a current bug in Office 2016 that prevents SharePoint connected O365 accounts from working properly across all products. Meaning Outlook has to configure using IMAP and OneNote simply does not work.
I ran into this problem today, when connecting to a new SharePoint environment. I work with several of our clients and can’t believe this is an issue. I had minimal accounts connected, maybe a personal and 3 others. So, Jan 2018, it’s still an issue.
Unfortunately, yes. I think MS is more concerned about license “overusage”, moreso than that you’re connected to too many services. Whatever the case, I agree – this is a poorly chosen limit (especially for those of us legitimately making a living connecting to multiple services).