#AzureAD in the new Azure portal: Week 1 update – Already being used in 125 countries!

[Alex Simons (AZURE)]

First published on CloudBlogs on Sep, 21 2016
Howdy folks – If you follow our blog, you know that last Monday we turned on the public preview of Azure AD in the new Azure portal. We knew there would be a lot of interest, but we been astounded by the level of interest from all around the globe! In the first week of the preview we saw some pretty amazing stats:

• Admins from over 18,000 organizations accessed the new AAD admin experience
• Admins from organizations in 125 countries accessed the new AAD Admin experience
• More than 7,000 administrators used the new AAD Admin experience on a least two different days during the week
• More than 4,000 administrators used the new experience to make some kind of change (add/update/delete) in their directory tenant

For the fun of it, one of the PM’s on our team plotted the usage of the portal on a world map to show just broad spread it was:

Worldwide usage of the new Azure AD Portal 9/12/16-9/18/16. Each shaded country had 1 or more active users!

Note - If for some reason you haven’t already tried out the new Azure AD experience, you really owe it to yourself to check it out! Just sign in to the new Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com as a global administrator (no Azure subscription needed) and click on Azure Active Directory in the left navigation bar or in the More services menu. You can also get a video tour of the new experience here.

We’ve also been thrilled with the positive reaction you’ve had to the release. Here are two of our favorite tweets from the week:

We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from you on the capabilities you want us to add in the new experience and that you would like to see us get to feature parity with the old portal as soon as possible. Believe me, we hear you! The team is jazzed about the positive reception last week and they are busting a hump to add quality features as fast as possible. Soon you’ll be seeing a lot of new features go live:

• Support for all built-in directory roles
• Create & delete a directory tenant
• Continual improvements in navigation and layout
• Improved experiences for managing B2B collaboration
• Administration experiences for self-service and dynamic group membership
• Our enterprise apps “App gallery” experience
• Self-service application access configuration
• Many more reports with improved capabilities for searching and filtering

We’re also grateful for the feedback you’ve given that is helping us improve one the experience that we have in our preview today. We’ve received a few bug reports (such as seeing a GUID in a sign-in report where you expect to see a user name), and we’re working to rapidly fix those. We’ve also received some great feedback on the parts of our new experience that aren’t as smooth as you want them to be. We’re putting plans in place now to address those. For example we will make it easier and more obvious how to change tenants. And we’re working on a  streamlined experiences for app registrations, so that after you’ve added an app you can easily create an access assignment for it. And, of course, there’s a whole lot more – we want the Azure AD administration experience to be absolutely world class. And we can’t do that without your feedback. So please keep it coming! You can send us feedback in the ‘Admin Portal’ section of our feedback forum . Best regards, Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons ) Director of Program Management Microsoft Identity Division