In our interactions with users, we see a lot of confusion over the word account. Currently we use account to mean things like https://contoso.visualstudio.com and things like admin@contoso.com. To avoid this confusion, and to better align with the terminology of the broader developer and OSS community, we will be adopting the word organization in Visual Studio Team Services.

For example, in documentation:

To sign in to your VSTS account at any time, go to https://{youraccount}.visualstudio.com.

…will become:

To sign in to your VSTS organization at any time, go to https://{yourorganization}.visualstudio.com.

Similarly, in the Settings experience:

…will become:

This change is rolling out with our Sprint 137 Update, and the corresponding changes in our documentation will be rolling out soon as well. Our hope is that the change makes things more intuitive for new users while being minimally disruptive for existing users.

One important note – we have been working for some time to enable grouping multiple VSTS organizations together under a higher-level artifact. We had been calling this artifact an organization in blog posts (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2016/01/11/how-we-plan-to-enable-creating-multiple-collections-per-account/ and https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2016/04/09/merging-the-concepts-of-account-and-collection/) as well as in our communication with some users already trying it out in private preview. The work here will continue, and we’ll be coming up with a new name for these groupings of organizations.