We have been using Live@edu for student email and are currently in the process of converting to from Live@edu to O365. As a part of this process the consumer services (specifically SkyDrive) is separated and preserved as a personal Microsoft account.

On the weekend of September 13 we used a non-production Live@edu tenant to do a test migration. After this we experienced a situation where all the contents of a SkyDrive rendered inaccessible to the Microsoft Personal Account that was created through the migration process.

We are coming up on the production migration that will involve >120,000 accounts. It is important for us to understand what happened and, if there is a risk of this happening again, how we can mitigate it, or effectively respond to it with our institutional support channels.

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Our tenancy of Live@Edu is federated using Shibboleth. This means that we were unable to connect using desktop/mobile clients eliminating that as a source of issues. Additionally, the Windows Live IDs we have been using are different than the email addresses.

On a test tenancy after following the MS procedure to recover access to the account I was able to successfully access the Microsoft Personal Account only to discover that the prior SkyDrive contents was inaccessible (there had been several folders and files before the migration). Before the migration, I had shared several files and folders. These shares (and the content) is still accessible via URLs I had emailed to myself, or directly shared to another user’s SkyDrive.

Investigating the issue with our Microsoft support contacts we’ve managed to determine that there are three ‘NetIDs’ associated with this Windows live ID in question. Our current theory is that after the migration the ‘wrong’ NetID was picked up and this could be fixed by changing the active association. However, we have been unable to identify a support channel capable of verifying this diagnosis and assisting us. I can provide specific account details offline as required.