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How to share your Office 365 Skype minutes with your own (separate) Skype account

The problem: Some Office 365 subscriptions include a certain number of monthly Skype minutes. You want to use these with your existing Skype account, but you can’t find a way to connect it to your Office 365 account.

The reason it doesn’t work: A Skype account is also a Microsoft account. You cannot merge two Microsoft accounts, therefore you can also no longer merge or connect your Skype and Microsoft (Office 365) accounts.

The workaround: If your Office 365 subscription can be shared with other Microsoft accounts, you can also share it with your own Skype account.

This is how you share your Office 365 subscription and free Skype minutes with yourself (as of March 2018):

If you go to your Skype account settings, you’ll see an option to “connect a Microsoft account”:
Skype connect Microsoft account

What this actually does (instead of connecting a Microsoft account and Skype account) is to redirect you to account.microsoft.com where you can sign in using your Skype credentials (because, as mentioned, your Skype account is already a Microsoft account). I you’re asked to add a phone number or e-mail, you’ll notice that you can’t use the e-mail address of your existing Microsoft account. Enter a different e-mail instead.

Verify your e-mail, then sign out of your Skype/Microsoft account and log in to your Microsoft account with the Office 365 subscription. Share the entire Office 365 subscription with your Skype/Microsoft account using the e-mail address you provided in the previous step:

Sign out, accept the invitation using your Skype/Microsoft account, then activate your free Skype minutes in your new Office account:
Just click on “activate” (or waste a lot of time reading outdated information about linking accounts, then come back and click on “activate”):
You should now see the subscription in your Skype account settings, too:

Notes:

Instead of signing in and out of your accounts you could stay signed in on two different browsers (or using incognito mode).
If your Office 365 subscription does not allow sharing (or if you’ve already used all invitations), you can obviously not use this method. I don’t know of any alternative methods you could use.
~~If you’re reading this article in the future… as opposed to reading it in the past…~~ The method I described worked for me in March 2018. Things will look different and work differently at some point in the future.
In the comments below, feel free to rant about Skype and Microsoft, say nice things about me or propose your own solution to the problem. Don’t ask me to fix your issues! Think about it, Microsoft is a large and immensely wealthy company while I’m just some poor blogger. Ask them for support, not me.

My favourite restaurants in Luxembourg

I just downloaded and installed the new Skype 3.1 which now includes SkypeFind. This feature “lets you recommend and share your favourite local businesses with the entire Skype community”. A nice idea, hopefully it won’t get overwhelmed with spam like the comment function of my blog.

So far, there were only two restaurants listed in Luxembourg, so I added my 3 favourite places. After providing valuable free content to Skype, I’m going to post my mini-reviews here as well. I might come back later to update this post (there are so many great restaurants in Luxembourg it’s hard not to gain weight). As I’m a vegetarian, the restaurants mentioned below are veggie-friendly. Should you happen to know any other great restaurants in Luxembourg that you think I should check out, please leave a comment (note that I don’t like very formal places and no, seafood isn’t vegetarian even if Chi-Chi’s thinks otherwise).

Restaurant Royal Chine: My favourite restaurant in Luxembourg due to the great choice of vegetarian dishes. Of course, they serve traditional Chinese food, too, as well as some Korean specialities (like Kimchi). It seems there’s a Chinese restaurant on every street in Luxembourg now, but this one really stands out and I suspect many of the friends and family members who come to visit me actually just want me to take them to the Royal Chine. 😉

Disclosure note: I’m good friends with the owners and designed their webpage (for free). However, this doesn’t make anything I wrote above less accurate or true. In fact, you can take advantage of my “guanxi” and send me whatever sincere comment you might have concerning this restaurant and I’ll mention it to the lǎo bǎn next time I go there. Or you could pretend being a friend of mine to see if you get a discount.

Restaurant Star of Asia: Lovely Indian restaurant with great food, relaxed atmosphere and very friendly service. Popular with locals and expats alike. My favourite dish is Bhagara Baigan (Aubergine curry) plus Chilli Naan (Indian bread). I’m getting hungry right now just from writing this comment. 😉

Disclosure note: I’m good friends with the owners, designed their webpage (for free) and also did an ad for them which was printed in Paperjam magazine. This shouldn’t make you think that I’d write an embellished review. Quite to the contrary, I wouldn’t consider designing a website for a bad restaurant!

Ristorante Dal Notaro: This would be the perfect Italian restaurant – if only it was closer to my home! 😉 Seriously, I love going there because it’s always a totally enjoyable experience. Great food, great atmosphere, what more could you want? Wine, you say? They have a superb selection of great (mostly Italian) wines, too!
The menu is apparently only available in Italian, but you can always ask the waiter to translate. My favourite dishes: Melanzane e mozzarella (starters) and Pappardelle alla trilogia di funghi.

Disclosure note: Nope. I wish, but there’s nothing to disclose. No connection other than me often going there.

BTW, the “sushi” picture above isn’t really related to this article as it was taken at a Japanese restaurant in Taichung, Taiwan. No luck finding a veggie-friendly Japanese restaurant in Luxembourg so far.

JAJAH can’t make calls to Taiwan anymore

I have to admit it has been a while since I last used JAJAH. As I’m sitting in front of the PC most of the day, Skype is just a tiny bit more convenient. Still, I was disappointed to find out that it’s currently not possible to make calls to Taiwan with JAJAH.

Here’s what their support had to say: “[…] The service to [Taiwan] is temporarily unavailable due to regulation issues. Please note that we cannot provide specific dates for when certain destinations will be available. […]”

🙁

JAJAH on your mobile phone – it works!

If you have no idea what JAJAH is, you’re probably paying too much for your phone calls. You should go have a look at my post from February.

Good, now that we’ve established I’m not always too late reporting interesting new developments ;), let me tell you that using JAJAH’s VOIP-based callback service on a mobile works very well. While I couldn’t test the “seamless integration” on phones using the Symbian OS, triggering a callback with the Java application is not too much of a hassle either. For a list of supported phones and further information, go here.

Thank you, JAJAH! No longer will I have to postpone making international calls until I’m on a PC. 😀

Please note (to prevent expensive misunderstandings): If you use JAJAH while roaming outside your operator’s network,
you’ll of course still have to pay roaming charges for the incoming (callback) call.

Jajah.com – VoIP with any ordinary phone

Combine the advantages of VoIP with a WWW-triggered callback system and you get: Jajah, the newest VoIP prodigy child.

No need to install software on your PC, no need to use a headset or an external VoIP gateway or phone: all you need is an internet connection to enter your phone number and the number you want to call in your browser. Seconds later, your phone rings and the connection to the destination number is established.

It’s hard to imagine an easier solution for making cheap phone calls and even your least tech-savvy friends and relatives should be able to use Jajah. 😉 But Jajah is more than some sort of “Skype for idiots”, just consider the following situations:

You’re using almost all your bandwidth to download… uh, “large files”, so PC-based VoIP would not be possible with an acceptable quality.
You’re sitting at a PC with a slow internet connection, or no headset, or you’re not allowed to install software.
You just want to use your old-fashioned phone instead being bound to a headset.

Of course, Jajah has some disadvantages, too: You can’t make free PC-to-PC calls* and the sound quality is limited by your ordinary telephone (and phone line). However, during some tests with calls from Luxembourg to Taiwan, we found the quality to be no worse than when *gasp* making a regular phone call.

Unlike many VoIP providers, Jajah uses a “post-paid” system instead of forcing you to pre-pay. Plus, you get 5 minutes for free when you first register your phone number. Currently, you can only pay by credit card and – as we found out – you have to be careful when doing so: if the country you’re located in doesn’t match the country where your credit card has been issued in, your payment will be declined and your account will be locked. Unless you have many phone numbers to register, you’ll have to contact Jajah’s customer support to unlock your account. On the plus side, response time was very fast.

In conclusion, in the time it took you to read this post, you could easily have made your first phone call. Don’t hesitate! Wake up your relatives in another corner of the world now and tell them about Jajah!

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*Update Nov. 19, 2006: Since several months, JAJAH allows you to make free phone-to-phone calls under certain conditions.