New Active Directory Features in the Windows Azure Portal

Important news this morning!

If you took advantage of the organizational sign-up for Windows Azure, where you can access your Windows Azure subscription using your directory accounts, this morning you are in for a fantastic treat. In a nutshell, from now on you can use the active directory area of the Windows Azure portal for:

• Managing users. You can now create, delete and update users; and of course, you can assign roles that will determine what the user can do with the directory in the portal itself.
• Registering domains. You are now able to register the domains owned by your organization directly from the Windows Azure portal
• Setting up dirsync. If you want to connect your Windows Azure Active Directory to your Windows Server AD, as discussed here, there’s some setup to be made; now you can control the whole process directly from the Windows Azure portal
• Preview: phone-based multifactor auth for administrators. Tell me the truth, how many times have you wished for a higher level of authentication assurance but gave up because you didn’t want/could not invest in PKI and smartcards? Well, guess what: we are previewing a multifactor authentication mechanism for which your admins are just required to… have their phone with them!

Alex is sharing all the details in a post on the Windows Azure blog: do check it out!

For the occasion I wrote a short visual guide to help you to experience the new features: I broke that down in

1. Signing up for a Windows Azure subscription backed by an organizational account
2. Exploring the new directory features in the portal
3. Adding a co-admin from the directory and use phone-based multi-factor authentication

Lots of screenshots, please be patient while the posts load