Streamline admin, developer, and end-user experiences—June identity updates

[Alex Simons (AZURE)]

Howdy folks,

I'm excited to share new Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enhancements that will streamline administrator, developer, and end-user experiences. These new features really highlight our efforts to simplify identity and access management, while we also enhance the kinds of customization and controls our customers need.

Empowered administrative experience

We recently redesigned the Azure AD overview blade to provide high-level tenant information, make the search experience more intuitive, and manage multiple tenants more easily:

• Unified search (preview)—Previously, our search experience required admins and users to specify filters. In June, we launched a unified search experience that enables a quicker way to search within your tenants—across all categories. This is supported within Azure AD as well as Azure AD B2C tenants.
  
  

Unified search experience across users, devices, applications, and administrative units.

• Switch tenants (preview)—Tenant switching enables customers to view all their Azure AD and Azure AD B2C directories in one place, switch between tenants, and view tenant details without leaving the Azure AD portal.

Improved API support for applications

• Identity protection APIs in Microsoft Graph (general availability)—Two Azure AD Identity Protection APIs, riskyUsers and riskDetections, are available in the v1 endpoint in Microsoft Graph. The riskyUsers API enables you to query information about specific users and their risk status, while riskDetections API enable you to query information about specific risk detections and why they are risky.
  
  

Query new Azure AD APIs in Microsoft Graph Explorer.

• Application proxy management API for Microsoft Graph (beta)—With the API set in beta for Microsoft Graph, as well as for the EDU endpoint, you now have full coverage for all the App Proxy management actions available in the Azure AD portal or via PowerShell. The API set provides the ability to automate the following scenarios:
  • Configure App Proxy properties for an app
  • Configure single sign-on (SSO) for legacy authentication modes
  • Manage connectors in connector groups
  • Manage connector groups and apps assigned to connector groups
    
    

Intuitive user experiences

• My Apps and My Account user portals default experience (general availability)—Earlier this year, we refreshed the My Apps and My Account portals, which provide a single point of discovery for end users to launch all of their applications and access self-service tools for their identity profile. Currently, these refreshed experiences have been optional, separated from their predecessors with unique URLs. Starting in August, we will be making these refreshed portals the default experience to streamline touchpoints for yourselves and your customers. If you have not already done so, we recommend checking out these new experiences and sharing their new capabilities with your users.
  
  

My Apps portal allows users to see what apps they have access to and the collections they’re enrolled in.

• Access reviews user default experience (general availability)—With the transition to the new My Apps experience, access reviews, which live in the My Apps portal, will soon transition to the refreshed My Access experience. The updated experience offers the same functionality as the legacy experience with an improved user interface and new capabilities to keep users productive. For more information, check out our documentation here. Users can already see a banner in My Access to try the new experience, which will be rolling out as the default starting in August 2020.
  
  

Simplify how a designated reviewer performs an access review for members of a group or users with access to an application.

• Refreshed Azure AD and Microsoft 365 sign-in background design (general availability)—In March, we announced plans to roll out a new default background image on Azure AD and Microsoft 365 sign-in screens. The new image (rolled out to all customers in early May) helps reduce bandwidth requirements and improve perceived page load times, especially on slower networks.
  
  

New Azure AD and Microsoft 365 sign-in background design reduces bandwidth requirements and improves perceived page load times.

• Basic formatting for sign-in experiences (general availability)—We enhanced the Company Branding functionality to allow greater customization of the Azure AD and Microsoft 365 sign-in experience. Now, customers can enable hyperlinks and simple formatting, such as bolding, underline, and italics. We began rolling this feature out in June, and it will be deployed to all tenants by July. Read the documentation to learn more.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback or suggestions in the comments or on Twitter (@AzureAD). Additionally, I hope that you will join myself and other Microsoft identity thought leaders at Identiverse Virtual 2020 throughout this summer. Registration is free and includes access to sessions covering important topics in our industry, such as Zero Trust, open standards and decentralized identities, privacy, and more.

Alex Simons (@Alex_A_Simons)

Corporate VP of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division