Office 365 Outlook Activation Issue

This one is extremely frustrating. Why Microsoft doesn't have some sort of menu accessible option to deactivate/sign-out a user with Office 365 on Macs I will never understand.

I've been encountering the message "Another account from the same organization is already signed in." when attempting to activate an Office 365 Outlook installation. I finally found the fix for it on the 365 forums, but wanted to re-state here as well as highlight the importance of removing OneNote license data.

To fix this issue, you must delete ALL of the activation and certificate items associated with Office/Outlook/OneNote:

1. Quit all Microsoft applications.

2. Open Library folder of current user (\Users\<Username>\Library)

3. Delete following files from Users\<Username>\Library\Containers
com.microsoft.Office365ServiceV2
com.microsoft.onenote.mac
com.microsoft.outlook

4. Delete following files from Users\<Username>\Library\Group Containers
*.ms
*.Office
*.OfficeOsWebHost
*.OneNote.*

5. Start KeyChain.app and search for Microsoft. Delete anything you find associated with it such as:
Microsoft Office Identities Settings 2
Microsoft Office Identities Cache 2

6. In KeyChain.app, search for OneNote. Delete anything you find associated with it.

7. In KeyChain.app, search for the beginning of your organizational domain name (e.g. if your e-mail address is [email protected], search for “contoso” without quotes). Delete anything you find associated with it of the type Exchange password.

8. Empty the Trash. If you get errors, restart the Mac and try again. These MUST be completely deleted or the files will still be referenced by the applications.

You should now be able to launch Outlook 365 and activate normally.

Comments

  1. SumaSeptember 17, 2015 at 10:45 PM

    I've been struggling with this issue for weeks and your post totally worked !
    Thanks a ton !!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Miloš RanđelovićMarch 19, 2016 at 2:47 AM

    Finally resolved! I have struggled with Office 365 in El Capitan for 2 months now, until I stumbled upon this post today!

    My issue was slightly different - I had "The Office365ServiceV2 found a problem and needs to be closed" issue, and I have tried every possible thing imaginable:

    1) Reinstalled the entire Office package numerous times
    2) Tried rolling back to previous versions
    3) Cleared preferences and every single file from my MBP over and over again
    4) Tried every suggested approach on the Internet I could find
    5) Etc, etc...

    I had already tried deleting files from your steps 3 and 4 before, but without success.

    What I did differently now, and missed before, was to delete the information from the keychain (steps 5 and 7), and in combination with deleting all the cached preferences, it worked!

    I believe the root cause of the problem was that my organisation had made a mandatory password change to our Exchange accounts, and somewhere my old password was cached (the Keychain entries I suppose) and causing the Office365ServiceV2 to crash during startup. I may be wrong, but nevertheless my issue is gone now.

    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sean CJune 20, 2016 at 5:36 PM

    Great post, thank you... after trying manually cleaning myself and following other suggestions online, this was the golden ticket.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Joan Dempsey (@LiteraryLiving)December 22, 2016 at 6:01 AM

    Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! What a relief. You made my day. :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Lisa SkierkaJanuary 6, 2017 at 12:45 PM

    Great info. Will this work for trying to install a second company email on my Office 365 for Mac. It was working before but now I'm getting this exact same error message. Not sure if it's because of the 2nd email addition or the exact problem that you explain above. (OR is they're the same problem.) Many thanks....

    ReplyDelete
  6. LikeableBiasJanuary 6, 2017 at 12:50 PM

    I would guess that you're running into a similar issue with the incorrect credentials being stored for actually activating the Office suite. If you run through these instructions, it should clear those out and allow you to configure the correct account first and activate Office, then add the second account afterward just fine.

    ReplyDelete

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