A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experience of resetting my Office 365 password/disabling password expiry after I became locked out. At the time I had some issues proving my identity because there was no ‘phone number on file for my account. I had added my mobile number to the user profile associated with my mailbox but that didn’t seem to be what the support team needed.

I’ve since learned that the crucial field is on the technical contact details for the organisation. A Microsoft Support Engineer wrote in an email to me:

“[…] the company information can be changed from the Online Portal. When you sign in and navigate to the admin panel, you should see your organization’s name in the upper left corner. When you click that, it brings up your organization’s information. The global administrator can edit these fields by mousing over them and clicking the small ‘Edit’ button that appears.”

Interestingly, since my support incident, Microsoft has introduced self-service password resets for Office 365 but these seem to be reliant on two other pieces of information that are specific to an individual user account:

• An alternate email address (one that’s not on the Office 365 system – I used a Hotmail account that is also a connected account so I still see service updates in my usual mailbox).
• The mobile phone field in the user properties (i.e. the one that I had set on my account but which was not the one Microsoft Support were looking for!)