This is hopefully a quick guide to get you out of a hole with the old, free O365 offer BT did. Neither MS or BT will be helpful with this BUT if you can make it to second line support, you do get the answer. Neither online chat/WhatsApp or basic business support will be able to help and you’ll often end up getting the run around.
You can *try* to ask MS to remove the account, I’ve tried numerous avenues to make this happen, none even got a response even those suggested by our O365 partner. Its also been suggested invoking right to be forgotten may be helpful but I’m not sure how that applies here.
If you have an on site exchange server you *may* have had random password warnings after an Outlook patch a few months ago, I think I covered this elsewhere but it does serve as a warning you *may* be about to run into this issue.
This will only work if you can still log into the BT business portal at http://business.bt.com/ Otherwise you’ll need to throw yourselves on their mercy. The portal is painfully slow and I got a fair few HTTP 500 errors. The Ui doesnt seem to refresh that well, this may be Edge as Chrome wouldn’t login at all!
The Scenario:
Customer would like to move to Office 365. Upon setting up the count you find their tenancy can’t be completed as the domain is already used in a tenancy elsewhere. It transpires the customer had a 365 account which is no longer used as part of a BT business package. The above password symptoms can give this away.
The Fix:
Log into http://business.bt.com/
Under “Manage Services” click “Manage Domains”
Click “Manage Email Accounts” to expand it
Find your package, normally “Business Email Lite” and click Manage
Every single account shown on the domain you wish to recover must be removed, this isn’t a quick process. you’ll potentially have issues with the Primary User. Use the “go back to main hub” link at the bottom liberally as it seems to not always refresh the email list.
Primary User:
*IF* your primary user is not an account on that domain then you are done. The moment the last user of your domain has gone BT will release that domain.
If the user *is* a member of the domain this is where is goes all runny. I’ve not been able to find a way within the broken UI or O365 to do this. You are on the mercy of BT for this step I’m afraid. However if you call them and are clear about what you want and what you are trying to do this will only take a few moments to sort,