I currently have an iPad 3, personal, and an iPhone 5, company owned but free to use for personal usage also. Both of these are synced with iTunes using an iTunes account with my personal gmail address. The company just purchased for me an iPad Air (not Air 2) and installed my work exchange email account on it as well as Office and we are experimenting with OneDrive as a data synching method. I am a guinea pig for the company in terms of tablet use for the company.
My question: I am free to use the iPad for personal use also, just like my iPhone. But they set it up with a new Apple account using my work email as the account name. So - I want to be able to synch it to my phone and my other iPad with my gmail Apple account. What are the potential issues with it being set up with a different Apple account ID? What’s the best way to do this? Is this something that is simple? For example, if MS Office for the iPad was installed with my work email as the Apple account and now I somehow switch it to my gmail account, will Office “object” somehow?
I think it’s going to depend on whether the app takes its log-in directly from the device via AppleID, or whether you’re just using that email as a username in the app. For instance, back when Comixology used to allow purchases on iOS, you could either buy via the AppleID without creating a Comixology account (which would in principle create issues with a different Apple account), or you could hook it up to a separate Comixology account, in which case it didn’t matter which Apple account you used on the device (well, there may be a device count limit, but you see what I mean). For Office, I can’t recall off the top of my head how it works, but I’d be surprised if it was hard tied to one AppleID per device, though if so it might count toward your device activation limit for Office.
Just change it so it’s set up with your regular Apple ID, and set up Office with the work email. Each app that pays attention to Apple IDs can generally use a different one - I’ve set up Game Center with a different Apple ID than the one use for syncing and purchases, for example. The Mail app lets you collect mail from several email addresses at once.
I was given an iPhone from work a few years ago that they had set up with an iCloud account of theirs. This allowed them to remote wipe, blah, blah, blah. It also meant that it was being backed up to their account and not mine. In the iCloud settings, I just deleted their account and added my existing Apple ID instead. Worked fine. Any apps that require the work address can be signed in individually with that account, just as Gus mentioned. I had no problem having my work email, calendar, contacts, etc. set up alongside my personal ones as well. Just make that change in the iCloud settings, and then add your personal accounts in the Mail, Contacts, and Calendars section and you can have multiple working alongside each other just fine.
