Creating a VSTS Account for Demos

I need a VSO account for Demos which needs to be separate from my personal and business VSO accounts. The problem is though if you go to the Visual Studio Online page and click Get started for free

and then sign in with your existing account details you are directed to your VSO profile page that shows all your VSO accounts.

So what do you do?

The first thing you are going to need to do is create another Microsoft Account (Live ID). At this point I'd recommend starting a new In-Private browsing session so that you aren't automatically logged into services. Head over to https://account.live.com/ and create a new Microsoft Account or you can head directly to http://www.visualstudio.com/ and create a Microsoft Account as part of your VSO Account creation.

I created my Microsoft Account before continuing to create my VSO account.

Creating a new VSO Account

Go to http://www.visualstudio.com/ and click on the Get started for free button. Enter an account name and click Create Account.

You now have a new VSO account 🙂.

Adding a new User to your VSO Account

From the new accounts landing page which should look like below

Click on the Users tab in the main navigation

Enter your primary VSO account Sign-in address (that you want to link this account to) and choose the License that this user must get and then click Send Invitation.

At this point you will be able to log into the new VSO account with your primary VSO account.

Switching your VSO account Ownership

The last thing we need to do is switch the ownership of our new VSO account. Ideally for most Demos you would want to be the owner of the VSO account. To change the owner of a VSO

Then click on the Settings tab

Choose the owner account (your primary VSO account for this example) and click Save.

Deleting a user from VSO

At this point you'd be able to delete the user from the demo account that you used to create the account with. You might want to do this if you for one need to use your 5 basic users free accounts for other demo users or if you want to repeat the steps in this post and don't want to create another Microsoft Account to do it with. To delete the user your create simply select them in the users screen and then click Delete.

You'll be asked if you are sure, click Delete User.

You now have a new VSO account linked to your primary Microsoft Account so you don't have to use different sign-in accounts for demos and your other VSO accounts that you may be apart of 🙂