New Office 365 Admin Center Review

Microsoft have graciously given our tenant access to a sneak peek of the new Office 365 Admin Center and we thought we’d show you around.

You’ll know when your tenant has been given access as you’ll be offered the option to “get a sneak peek” of the new Admin center.

If you click this button you’ll be greeted by an LSD-Induced image of a cat riding a fire breathing unicorn… for some reason… and the new layout of the Admin center.

User Management, Service Status, and Billing/Subscription Management seem to be the only features they have available within the new portal so that is what we’ll be focusing on today.

To get access to these features, you can click on the “Hamburger Menu” button at the top left of the screen.

From here, you can click on the Service Status page under the Health. This gives a far clearer indication than the previous portal of what services are up and running and which have issues.

Managing users has also been given a facelift, although I am not sure what the purpose is of the colored circles with the initials of the user’s name. At the time of writing the search box also didn’t seem to work properly, but we have provided this feedback to Microsoft and they will no doubt get it fixed up pretty quickly.

Clicking on a User will bring up a nicely formatted page with quick access to some key Admin functions.

Unfortunately the new interface doesn’t at all scale responsively for smaller screen resolutions and mobile devices. I guess Microsoft are hoping people will revert to their mobile Administration apps whilst on the go.

Whilst the whole interface seems half baked in its current form, it does show a lot of potential and we’re excited to see where it goes next!

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