Hey folks,
We often hear from our customers that in an effort to keep up with a demand for increased productivity and IT modernization, more and more organizations are faced with an avalanche of applications to manage for their users. This is why we’re obsessed with constantly innovating and making it easier for you to configure and manage all your apps from Azure AD, and also unlock the security, authentication, and collaboration benefits of managing identity as the control plane from the cloud.
One area where we focus our efforts is to pre-integrate software-as -a-service (SaaS) apps with Azure AD, so you can easily configure apps and allow your end users to have consistent single sign-on (SSO) experiences across all their cloud apps. In the past 3 months alone we’ve added 76 apps with integrated SSO support to our gallery based on your feedback and our research; if you need an app integration added just holler and we’ll get working on it! Here’s a peek at some of the new integrations with cool apps which you can start using today:
- Brightidea – a central hub to manage all your innovation initiatives
- Deskradar – create and view interactive seating charts for your organization
- Empactis – a platform to manage all aspects of employee health
- Fat Finger – enables companies to digitize any procedure and to gain insights and coach users
- Fulcrum – a mobile forms platform to build custom apps for collecting data in the field
- MindTickle – a tool for sales coaching and enablement
- Smartvid.io – improve safety, productivity, and quality via AI for architecture and construction
- Stormboard – a shared sticky note and whiteboard platform
- Visitly – fast visitor sign-in and sign-out for your workplace
You can see the full list of new SaaS apps and get monthly updates of what has been added in our release notes. If you get stuck adding any of these apps, we have tutorials to walk you through the process step-by-step. If you are building an app and would like to list it in our Azure AD app gallery, or if you want to flag us to add an app integration for your org, please follow these steps.
In addition to SaaS app integrations, our team is also always hard at work at building in new app configuration, management, and security features into Azure AD to deliver on the promise and expectations of Azure AD as the world’s #1 enterprise identity service. In case you missed any of these, here are some new features we’ve previewed in just the last few months:
- Expanded Azure AD Application Proxy support for more types of on-premises apps – Azure AD App Proxy, which enables seamless and secure access to on-premises resources without the need for a VPN, now supports SAML SSO. App Proxy also added new session cookie settings, like protecting cookies against copying or enforcing cookie transmission only over TLS secure channels, to help you meet your security and compliance requirements.
- Automated user provisioning for Zscaler apps – We expanded our partnership with Zscaler to enable automated provisioning and deprovisioning of user accounts for Zscaler’s SSO apps leveraging our shared support of the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) 2.0 standard protocol, which helps you eliminate manual processes and drive timely user lifecycle and access management.
- Support for SAML token encryption – To meet your internal security standards or compliance requirements, you can now encrypt the SAML token that Azure AD sends to an application after a successful authentication. If you were holding off migrating apps from Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) that require token encryption, now you can start to manage and secure them directly through Azure AD.
We have more exciting app integrations and feature developments in store, and we can’t wait to share them with you in the coming months. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback or suggestions– please leave them in the comments or reach out to us on Twitter (@azuread).
The Azure AD Team
