Note: When writing this blog, the Azure portal received an update which allows for switching directories. Unfortunately, this feature hasn’t been ported to the other Office 365 admin UI’s at this moment.

Being a consultant, you often find yourself having to switch tenants, or having to keep multiple admin portals open to different Office 365 tenants. This may become a nuisance, as you can use only a single set of credentials per browser instance. In other words, if you connect to the Office 365 admin portal using credentials A, opening up the Azure portal will be in the same context.

A typical workaround for this situation would be to open up a new private browser session. From that private browser session, you need to provide credentials B. Any new tabs in that private window will also be in the same context. The whole private session is hosted in a new window.

A more neat solution for this scenario is leveraging browser containers, such as:

• Firefox Multi-Account Containers
• Google Chrome’s Profile Switcher
• 3rd party add-ons

Notes:

• This blog is written based on Firefox Multi-Account Containers, so your mileage may vary if you’re using Chrome or a 3rd party add-on.
• Firefox also supports a basic version of context switching natively via about:config, setting privacy.userContext.enabled.
• I’m not aware of similar features or 3rd party add-ons for other browsers.

Unlike the Chrome extension, FireFox’ Multi-Account Containers allows you to have multiple sessions from within the same browser. For this purpose, tabs are used to arrange sessions in what’s called containers. Each container shares the same set of site preferences, sessions, cookies etc. To identify containers, they can be assigned a (new) name, color and symbol.

After installing the add-in, you will get a button that will open the container selection window. In this example, I have set up 4 containers besides the default ones: one for every customer and one for my lab. Selecting Contoso will open a new blank tab. The right side of the address bar contains a visual reference to the active container, showing label and symbol in the configured color.

Now, when you go to portal.office365.com, the Office 365 account picker may show up when connected before using this container. Pick one, or enter a new set of credentials. This account will be stored in this container. The question of wanting to stay signed in makes more sense now, as the token will be stored within the container, happily coexisting with other Keep-Me-Signed-In settings and sessions from other containers.

Now, when you open a different admin app in that tab, it will be in the same container and thus user context. You can also select to open a blank tab in that container, and navigate to portal.azure.com. You will notice it picks up the Contoso credentials provided earlier. This is because the session information is stored within the Contoso container.

Now click the container icon again, and select a different container, e.g. Fabrikam. Navigate to portal.office365.com, and you will notice you can provide new (or re-use) credentials which have a different context than Contoso. Also, opening the Azure portal after that in this container will be in the Fabrikam context.

Having set this up properly, you can easily switch between all admin portals from different tenants by selecting the different container tabs: no need to switch accounts or firing up separate private browser windows. This is a more elegant solution compared to private browsing sessions.

A final note that the above not only can be used to access the Office 365 admin portals of multiple tenants, but web-based applications such as Teams, Outlook Web Access or SharePoint as well.