How to detach, unlink, clear, remove, or rollback VSTS connection to Azure AD - azure-devops

Question

There are good instructions available here on changing the VSTS connection from one Azure AD to another: Change VSTS AD.
But what if you just want to remove the Azure AD integration, and just revert to using Microsoft Accounts?
I successfully performed all the steps in the instruction, up to the point of attaching a new target Azure AD. You'd think when the VSTS account was unlinked in Azure, it would no longer show up in VSTS.
But going to https://[AccountName].visualstudio.com/_admin/_home/settings still shows account being backed by the source directory.
Attempting to add a Microsoft Account based user at https://[AccountName].visualstudio.com/_user fails to find the account, presumably because it is looking the the Source Azure AD.
This is an important capability when transferring ownership of an account. Thanks for taking a look!

Answer 1

You can follow the steps here: Disconnect your Team Services account from Azure AD.
To stop using Azure AD and revert to using Microsoft accounts, you can
disconnect your Team Services account from its directory.
Here's what you'll need:
Microsoft accounts added to your Team Services account for all users.
Team Services account owner permissions for your Microsoft account.
Directory membership for your Microsoft account as an external user
and global administrator permissions. Azure AD members can't
disconnect Team Services accounts from directories.

Answer 2

With the help of Microsoft Premium Support, we did manage to get this worked out.
The problem was the Team Services was not disconnected from the associated Azure AD before it was unlinked. Then once it was unlinked, it appeared gone from Azure, leaving no way to disassociate Azure AD.
The documentation does show to first disconnect the VSTS account from Azure AD, and then “unlink” the account. Where I got into trouble was by using the new portal. It's pretty hard to even find the old portal anymore BTW).
The new portal has this nice handy unlink button, which is practically irresistible. If clicking it, then it declares success. There is nothing in the UI that prevents you from unlinking while still leaving the AD association. There is no option at all in the new UI portal, as far as I could find, to disconnect Team Services from Azure AD.
Once unlinked, the only fix is to relink, and then redo it all in the old portal as is indicated by the documentation.

Answer 3

This is much more difficult than it should be because it seems like something that should be simple to achieve through the web UI. These posts helped me, but I wanted to add my 2 cents:
In order to disconnect VSTS from AAD you need to be able to use the disconnect button on the configure tab in the old portal seen here. However, you can only use that button if you're the VSTS account owner and if your account is not sourced from the currently linked active directory (i.e. - a MS Account). But you can't make the VSTS account owner a MS account if you've used the portal's interface to add the MS Account to your AAD as an external user. This is because external users are added as Guest account type by default (rather than Member type). If you try to set the MS account as VSTS owner you get the "AAD guest users are not allowed to be collection owners" message seen here.
It's a chicken/egg thing which is made more difficult by the fact that the official documents for this process make no mention of the conflict you'll face. They read as if this should just work.
The answer is that (as of today) you can't do this without using Powershell or an AAD API to convert the MS Account from a "Guest" to a "Member" user type. There are a number or articles out there which walk through the older APIs to do this. Here is what I did with the latest PS:
First, log in to the directory you wish to unlink with an account which has permissions to modify members. Ideally an admin or owner.
Connect-AzureAD
Next, find the account you want to modify using this command:
Get-AzureADUser
Find the ObjectID of the user you want to convert from Guest to Member and then run this command:
Set-AzureADUser -ObjectId [ObjectID GUID Here] -UserType Member
This will convert the MS Account in the AAD you want to unlink to a 'member' type. In my situation I found that I had to remove the MS Account from VSTS and re-add it in order to trigger a refresh which allowed me to set it as account owner.
Now you just follow the documented steps:
set MS account as project owner. Save.
log in to old portal, go to configure tab, and disconnect
log back in everywhere to see the changes