Welcome to Microsoft Intra the podcast, otherwise known as episode 343 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast. See, we can rename things too. This episode was recorded live on July 14th, 2023. It's a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you today. I'm sure you've already guessed what we're talking about. The great rename of Azure Active Directory or Azure AD to
Microsoft. Enter ID or M E I D. Not to be confused with mobile equipment identifier. Anyways, on today's show we talk about all about the rename, what got renamed, what stays the same, what's confusing and our overall general opinion on the topic. Hope you enjoy the show. I did not update to Sonoma . I have abstained from Sonoma and kept my commitment to myself. I have thought about it with my laptop because it's just a random machine, but I have not done it yet. You.
Are not allowed to do any betas. Remember that's the agreement that we have. Yes. No more betas for me. No more betas. Is. There an autopilot for discord? Live streaming stability? There. Should be . All of it. Yeah, except that it's not Microsoft. Oh no. Co-pilot you mean Co-pilot for discord live streaming or autopilot? I don't know. We could use both . Oh anyways, aside from Apple updates and all that, you know what else changed? Uh. fun stat for you.
How many times is Azure Active Directory mentioned in Microsoft documentation and documentation? I'm thinking you know, not just docs like learn microsoft.com. Learn microsoft.com. Training certifications. Uh, Microsoft q and a, you know like like the official q and a support forum, reference articles, you know like the API reference articles, things like that. Yeah. So we have some guesses. We have some guesses in Discord 42. Haha. Funny Sean. It is the answer to everything.
Pirate Tomsky said 25,000 pirate. You are, you're not even close. Keep going . You need to. We shouldn't leave our listeners that are listening to this debating too long. Oh, Scott posted it. Almost two million one million five hundred thirty nine thousand. How do you have one more than me and six ? I have 1,539,000 or 1,539,005.
Apparently someone just added one more reference. Yeah, but even though Azure active directory is no more, Scott Azure active directory has been officially replaced with intra something . I'm gonna start with this. All hail intra . Here it. Is. I'm gonna start out with this, the news article if I can find it here, announcing new innovations. I have way too many tabs open. Essentially Microsoft's product announcement around this was that Microsoft or Azure active directory is becoming intra id.
Microsoft RA id. You gotta make sure you get the full thing in there. Yes, you. Gotta make sure I get Microsoft. So I wanna take some initial beef with just this because I don't even know where I wanna start with this. , it's Microsoft Enter id, but if you go look at everything else, so there's a bunch of references out there. This has been my question around a lot of this. What is hybrid Azure active directory become? What does all these other products essentially turn into?
And nobody is replacing Azure Active Directory with these in these product names with enter id. They're always replacing it with entra. I think this should be that Azure AD was renamed entra or Azure AD was absorbed into RA and now the portion ofra where you manage users is called Enter id. Doesn't make us flashy of a headline, but that's kind of my initial takeaway with this. I think the easiest way to think about it is maybe like, let's take a step back.
So there's an article out on docs which is called hopefully titled new name for Azure Active Directory. I think if you take that like let's just start right there. Like okay there's a new name for Azure Active Directory and that is Azure Active Directory coming fully under the enter brand, which we kind of knew, right? Like intro was this identity suite and suite of security identity focused security products and and things like that.
And now Azure AD is becoming Microsoft Intra ID as a part of coming in Tora id. It's an opportunity to go back and clean up potentially some of those other things that you talked about. So for something like an Azure AD joined client, you can just become an intra joined client. Even though like yes you are a technically a Microsoft intra ID joined thing, joined . I don't know if this gives like more flexibility down the line. I imagine it does.
Like if you ever wanna move away from that functionality or disambiguate it from what was the identity provider, I don't know how you do that at this point and disentangle those two things but whatever happens. So thankfully licensing stays the same for the most part. Like you can take the phrase Azure active directory. Uh, so say you had like an Azure active directory premium P one license, now you have a Microsoft Intra ID P one license or a Microsoft Enter ID P two license.
Where it starts to get weird is in some of the things that leave licensing land and that's things like, well I had an Azure active directory tenant and now my Azure active directory tenant is a Microsoft intra tenant not an ID tenant, it's just Antra tenant. Which if you think about it, it kind of makes sense because hey as as a holistic like you know, big thing that sits on top of it, like I kind of get it and at the same time I kind of don't.
Marketing's gonna market like we said this a whole bunch in the past and this like initiative like if you just take a step back and you go like okay, like what's going on? Like this is really a rename. Like we'll put aside the new functionality announcements cuz like there is net new stuff there or things I think that people have been potentially sitting on until this was coming. But Azure AD to Microsoft entry ID is just totally a a rename and the same exact thing.
One of the clearest explanations I've seen of this not surprising does not exist inside of Microsoft documentation. It is John Savile over on YouTube. Once again, I would recommend everybody just go watch that where I think he breaks it down very clearly like it was this and now it's this and there's literally no new functionality there. And if you wanna learn about the new functionality, he does have another video that's much longer.
I think like his one on the rename is like four or five minutes. It's pretty short. And then he is got like a 50 minute to follow it up on hey here's the things that are changing in the stack as Microsoft enters the s s E space and tries to play a little bit more over there. So we shall see. This does have like, I think wide reaching ramifications just on the documentation side. So back to hey there's 1.5 million mentions of that
across all these various properties. You know, there's a hundred and forty three, a hundred forty four K entries just across learn.microsoft.com which is like, you know, official docs put aside like learn materials and all the units and and things like that. So all of that branding effort has to go on first and there's no immediate or downstream impact to existing properties. So if you have existing Commandlets, you have SDKs like oh you're over here using the Microsoft graph.
And Microsoft Graph creates users in what was Azure actives directory and it's now Microsoft entry ad like the graph endpoints do not change the name of those endpoints. Do not change the SDKs do not change. PowerShell doesn't change anything like that. I would preface, I I guess I would like amend that to say those do not change
today. , who knows what happens in the future as some of this comes around, I'm, I'm sure there's gonna be renames in other places and other things that are gonna have to bleed into client tooling, SDKs, APIs, all that kind of stuff. But this is purely a front. Do you really think so though? It'll have to in some ways like, but. Look at PowerShell. So look at PowerShell for teams where it still has CS in there, which was what Microsoft Communication services which like predated link
and they still haven't updated some of that stuff. I see some places at Will. Yeah a lot of that stuff is driven by uh, like there's this weird line, there's the way things are named publicly and there's the way that users have been consuming those things if they've been in market for some time. I'm on the Azure side, right? I, I work in Azure storage, I am R P M for all of our SDKs and our client tools like easy copy things like that.
Like I am very sensitive to putting customers in a position where they have to take any kind of a breaking change and uh, sometimes like us changing a method name is a major deal for a customer and it's a breaking change so we bend over backwards not to do that. And sometimes that's at the expense of leading, leaving the old names and things in there. Like you just don't wanna break every PowerShell script out there.
You don't want to break say like, you know, like a couple weeks ago we were talking about Terraform and that it has an Azure AD Terraform provider inside of it. Like you don't wanna break that. Like that stuff's in market and it's ready to go. So I old stuff like no but new stuff I, you know, I think it's certainly in play absolutely as long as it's not confusing to customers. Like you can't start mixing Commandlets or API names like in the same space for the same piece of functionality.
But if there's something net new like call this SSE stuff, sorry, uh, security service edge stuff, s S E, when you're playing over on that side, you know that's an opportunity to start to go down a different path and you really don't have to worry about like disambiguating anything because it's just the way it was. So you're kind of all set. I. Have a question for you. Like end of the day my light's all broke in my office,
should they have done this? What do you think about, aside from all of that, I'm curious and I have my thoughts on just the actual rename itself as good choice, bad choice. What's your opinion on just yeah, the straight up rename . So Pirate in the chat says he agrees with it, he likes it. He doesn't like Azure active directory cuz it wasn't AD in the cloud. I never liked Azure active directory either, right? Like, like especially compared to other cloud identity providers like SAML
based identity providers, uh, that are out there. So you know, you've got like Thetas of the world and and things like that that exist. You've got Oracle idm, like there's a whole bunch of other stuff that was in market and it didn't carry the baggage of active directory as part of the name coming
through with it. So I think that's good Now same token, like people have been saying this should have never been called this since basically the day it was released and it's been in market for years and years and years and years. So the time to do this was a long time ago. The time to do this was not, you know, so many years into the product. I think that's my take like you know, my opinion, this is all me but like marketing marketed and that's it. We'll see what comes next on top of it.
I'm similar to you, I never liked the name either. Especially like you said six or seven years ago when everybody was comparing Azure active directory to active directory on-prem, people were just coming out of on-prem, they were coming to the cloud, they were like, oh now we have Azure Active directory. And it's like, yeah but it doesn't do GPOs, it doesn't have ous, it doesn't have this, it doesn't have that. It's not active directory.
It's identity in Azure. , if you wanna talk about active directory in Azure, you have to talk about Azure active directory Domain services are Azure A D D S. Absolutely it is was confusing. It still is confusing but to your point, and I'm the same way, a lot of people have gotten used to it. They should have made it a different name eight years ago, nine years ago when it first came out, it never should have been Azure AD initially. Now that it is, it just feels I'll be okay with it,
but it just makes the overhead to it so much greater. Like for instance, we talked about Learn and the documentation there 1.5 billion references, like you even think about all the articles about how to do this or how to do that or like YouTube videos, blog posts that I've written. If I go search Google, no I was searching Bing. If I search Bing for Azure AD and I put it in quotes and I get 58.8 million results, if I go search for Azure Active directory, I get 2.9 million results.
I mean there's not beyond just what Microsoft did, there's a lot of how-to articles, YouTube videos, blog posts that are all Azure active directory. Now I imagine on the backend maybe some of these search engines can make some tweaks so that intra ID starts returning Azure active directory. That ain't happening like, like Google's not, Google's not doing that,
right? Like it's, it's, it's not a thing. It's, it's going to take time. And I, I think, so one of the interesting things I saw that came out as kind of, I'll have to see, I don't remember if it's in the articles we have here, I actually saw somebody basically come out and say like, Hey we're gonna need the help of content creators to get the word out on this one. Which I thought was super interesting. Uh, you don't see that a whole lot.
Like it's not something that Microsoft can push out on its own. It's going to take a long time and probably for folks who listen to podcasts like this or you know, they watch John Savile's YouTube channel things like that that want to stay up to date on it. Like frankly,
like you're part of the marketing engine for this stuff, right? Like I, I know lots of folks are consultants, they work in market, they influence decisions and they talk to people in their organizations like, you're gonna be boots on the ground to get this stuff done, get this stuff done. Yeah. And that's, that's the reality of it. So, so like it's out there, it is what it is the ship is gonna sail already has, right? It's left Port .
So the great rename begins and then we all kind of get used to it and you know you're still gonna have confusing things in there I think. So I, I'll go back to like you and I were chatting about this earlier cuz there's a bunch of nuance to some of these things like back in that new name for Azure Active Directory article, they actually talk about what's not going to be renamed as well.
So there's a bunch of existing properties like Microsoft Graph Stays, Microsoft Graph sul, the, the Microsoft Authentication Library that still stays as Sul Graph PowerShell still graph PowerShell on Premises Active directory. So Windows Active directory, I guess Windows server active directory and anything associated with that stays the same. So things like a DFS Azure or Active Directory domain services and uh, no Active Directory Federation services.
And then you've got Active Directory domain services which is A D D S. Those stay the same because those are just on-prem active directory. There's this thing in Azure which is called Azure Active Directory Domain Services, which is going to be renamed to Microsoft Intra Domain Services. Which funny enough, the perfect product to call Azure active directory Directory would be what is running domain services as a PAs service, right?
Like that was the great opportunity that was missed here. But uh, whatever , what do I know? Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligent is here to help much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running Intelligent helps you with your Microsoft Cloud environment because that's their expertise.
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That's I N T E L L I G I N k.com/podcast for more information or to schedule a 30 minute call to get started with them today. Remember intelligent focuses on the Microsoft cloud so you can focus on your business. Other one that's gonna be a little strange in this is Azure Active Directory b2c and that one's called out in here under experiences that aren't impacted and this one's interesting to me and then it says Azure Active Directory B2C will continue to be available as an Azure service.
Which this one is kind of funny too because when you go create an Azure ad B2C instance, it creates another tenant and if you go to that tenant it literally says Azure Active Directory.
And it's just different functionality but I think this is gonna be available as a service only for a limited amount of time cuz you start digging through the documentation and there's this article out there that talks about planning for customer identity and access management which has a lot of the similar things to Azure B2C in terms of like federating with Facebook or federating with Google in building your apps on top of this customer identity and access management.
And there's also all these articles about Microsoft Intra external id, public preview that developer centric. And there's other articles too and I think it's maybe in one of the blog posts where it does start talking about this Microsoft intra external id. It's the customer identity. It's like that thing that has five different names. Well Azure A D B to C is going to exist as a service for now.
If you start reading through all this different documentation and looking at it, it appears that it is going to go away and it's going to get absorbed, it's going to evolve into this Microsoft Enter external id, I think it's staying as a service cuz they're not doing a rename and keeping the
service the same. It wouldn't appear is that eventually, I would guess, and this is just fewer speculation on my part, that we're gonna see that service deprecated and all of the functionality moved into a new product called some form of Microsoft Intra External id customer identity something or up there. I don't know, it's, it's, it's tough. So yeah somebody in the chat said Microsoft intra ID b2c. It's like no there's no plans for that , it's,
it's still gonna be Azure Active Directory b2c. Um, which uh, I get it like it's an Azure skew. So I guess that was another weird thing about Azure Active directory, Azure active directory. You know, it's one of those things that maybe wasn't even best served by ever being like managed out of the Azure portal and things like that. Like cuz it is this disconnected identity provider for multiple things. You know, it's your identity provider for all your Microsoft 365 workloads,
your Office 365 stuff and your Azure stuff. Like it's, it's the glue that holds them all together. So Azure active directory B2C as like an Azure service would make sense. The problem is it really like is a bunch of functionality that lives in the Azure active, the Microsoft and ID portal. So it's just like crazy confusing when you're browsing around and trying to figure those things out and hop between directories and tenants and all of that stuff, right?
Like one of the most confusing things I think like putting on like my trainer hat like back when I was an MCT and and actively training when the A Z 1 0 4 came out like when that uh, was a new Azure exam and got revamped, I was one of the authors for the A Z 1 0 4 exam and I wrote a couple of chapters in the Microsoft Press book.
So I wrote the chapters on Azure active directory and our back and that was an interesting thing to go through cuz I spent a whole bunch of my career as a trainer explaining to customers like oh great, you're a Microsoft 365 customer, congrats you're an Azure customer as well cuz you have this thing called Azure Active directory which just gets you into the Azure ecosystem even though it's not really an Azure product, right? It's, it's always been a confusing thing.
So you know like four or five years from now this is probably a different conversation and maybe it all starts to like get rationalized out and make more sense. Like I'm all about like make it easier and make it more simple. It's just gonna be super confusing for a while. Like while we bounce back and forth between these things. Yeah, 100%. Trying to think. There was another one, another resource I found too that helps out here and have you seen this ID Power Toys website before?
I had never seen this one until you pulled it out and showed it to me. So we should put this in the chat for everybody too. So if you go to id power toys.com there's a couple of things out there and one of them is a link to a mind map that they already created. Uh, but the other thing I didn't know, I'd never seen this before, I didn't even know it existed, is this conditional access documenter. I don't know if you fired this thing up, it's actually like pretty cool . It is.
Sean and I have played around with this a little bit before but yeah somebody at Microsoft has started putting together this ID power tools. It oh it's just Merrill on Twitter. He's a product manager at Microsoft. It's the same guy Scott that created um, the cmd.ms extension. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. He's a PM in Azure ad I should try and get him on the show someday too. I bet he'd be willing to come over here. You should.
He is very active on on uh, Mastodon. He, he toots a lot over there too so. Yes, but this Microsoft enter mind map one it has helped with a little bit of the naming of all this so it kind of gives you Microsoft RA and then all the different things that it breaks off into.
And I'm curious like is this Microsoft RA Id going to cause and this made me think of it especially when I looked at this new naming challenges because we've already talked about how people are shortening entra, ID Tora. But if you go look intra, you now have Microsoft enter external id, Microsoft entra ID governance, Microsoft RA verified id, Microsoft enter workload id, Microsoft Enter id, which was formerly known as Azure id, Microsoft intra ID protection.
Like there's a lot of Microsoft intra IDs and variations on that naming. So you're really now gonna have to be careful not when you talk about Azure AD or Azure A D D S or Azure A or just a D DS istra Id like you need to make sure you're talking about the right portion of Microsoft Enter or the right ID within Microsoft Entra because Microsoft ENTRA verified ID is very different from Microsoft Enter id which is very different from Microsoft entra, external id, those three in particular.
There's a lot of IDs for your IDs basically.
Yeah. But this mind map does kind of break out, okay, Microsoft Entra is all these different components of Microsoft entra, what's in each one, whether it's all your users, groups, devices for ID or conditional access technically falls under either Microsoft enter ID protection if it's risk-based or I saw it on here somewhere intra, intra Microsoft enter workload ideas, workload conditional access policies, like stuff is kind of moving around and shifting.
And even as you navigate through the portal, having this mind map up in front of you to know where you need to go for these different services could be a helpful thing to have. Because I have gone into intra and not been able to find stuff before. Cause it's kind of all shifting.
You and I spend time in there and we both pulled it up the other day like we, we tried to think about how we were gonna talk about this and we couldn't really find a way to do it cuz we started with, well let's do the thing where we just pull up and share a web browser.
We kind of look at it and we go through it and you start talking about it and you can't do it cuz it just spiders off in so many different directions and oh hey, if you click the link over there on the left for this thing, it takes you over to this thing that was really on the right, but now it's not on the right, it's down at the bottom of the page. So go look at that. And this thing is called id, but don't forget about that other thing. It's a lot.
We'll see where it all bakes out for folks that are sitting here and they're going like, oh my gosh, like why is this happening? And like it really is like a find and replace exercise. I think if you just like take a step back and kind of like think about it, like this is a big renaming exercise right now. The hard part's gonna come later , I think when when all the other stuff kind of catches up behind it
and we'll see what all that looks like. At least it's done this way. I, the intra thing is going to get even more confusing. So there were some new product announcements that came out along the way too. So earlier I mentioned the whole securities service edge thing, which is traditionally space that Microsoft hasn't played in like
super heavily or at least hasn't gone after. Kind of the, the folks who are in that, you know, upper right quadrant, if you look at like Gartner Magic quadrants and things like that for security service edge. So this all kind of screams like, hey this is a play to get in there. So now you've got like ra, internet access, Andra private access coming into the play on that side of things. So we'll like we'll see where all this falls out for now. It's just a big renaming exercise.
The things that you wanted to be renamed probably all weren't renamed and a bunch of them weren't renamed the right way. . Yeah, these new services are interesting. We'll have to do another episode talking about those. I, you can sign up for the preview of these so if you're listening and you wanna play with it before we talk about it, you can sign up for this Microsoft intra internet access and Microsoft enter, enter a private access.
I can see where this could solve some challenges or some things that I've had customers ask about before. But yeah, I think maybe going over these will be another episode. Yeah. And to be clear, like you can solve these things with other products that are in the market today. This is just kind of Microsoft coming in and doing the the first party play thing and having the extensions built out where they need to have them built out and ready to go.
Yep. 100%. Um, I'm trying to think if there's anything else. I feel like we've hit some of the most of the high points. I'm flipping through my tabs. Yeah, I think that's it. Like if, if I was gonna like if you're just like looking for like the T L D R for all of this, what you wanna do I think is go watch the Johns video. Like he does a very good job just explaining like in three or four minutes, hey here's what you need to know and then go read the article.
That'll be in the show notes, which is titled new name for Asher active directory. Like start with those two things and that gives you like more than the broad strokes about what's going on and doesn't get you mired down with what's the new stuff, what's like, not new, but maybe it's changing a little bit. Like all all all that kind of, all that kind of thing. And then pour one out for whoever has to accept the PR on this commit . Like when they do this massive find and replace for
144,000 articles , we'll see what happens. Yes. And I will say as much grief as we give them, I don't think the rename is necessarily bad. I wish it would've been done much, much longer ago. And the nice thing is is like you said, it's, it's a rename as customers. You're not gonna have to go out and go change a bunch of stuff, fix a bunch of stuff, stuff's not getting deprecated.
You don't need to go rewrite PowerShell modules unless you're still running on Azure id, in which case you have to write 'em for the Microsoft graph. But that's completely separate topic unrelated to this. That's outside of this one. Yeah. I would say that's the nice thing about this. Well it's a massive lift from a rename perspective, from a end user customer perspective. Just keep doing what you're doing and figure out where all your settings are in Thera portal.
I wore my shirt today, it says don't rush me, I'm waiting for the last minute. Like that's what the marketing team did here when they pushed this one out, like should have happened years ago. Yes. I think everybody like generally feels that way. Like it's always been kind of confusing. The the problem is, is we all got used to it being confusing and now it's gonna be confusing again for a while. Right.
And it's just fun to troll Microsoft on Twitter when they do things like this and rename products because what else are nerds gonna do in their free time? We. All need hobbies, you know. Well. With that we should probably wrap it up. I don't know exactly how long we've been going for. Theoretically something between 30 and 40 minutes we'll see . All right, sounds good. Well thanks Scott. It was interesting now to go figure out where everything is and go see if we control more people on Twitter.
All right. Or Mastodon Or Threads. Or. Threads or Blue Sky. Yeah, we should talk. I'm on threads. You're on threads. Anybody's on threads. Come join us on threads. All the. Socials. Yeah, we'll we'll get it sorted. But I think the Instagram account or our Instagram, the podcast is on threads too. I did create a, but I will say that's gonna be a little harder to share that handle. I don't know that I can. Well could you, I guess if you logged into Instagram with the podcast account,
you should be able to get to threads of the podcast account. We'll. See. Yeah, we'll get it all sorted. All right. Next week we're gonna try and bring a guest on, so that'll be fun. We'll see if we can pull that one off. Yes. And then everybody in the chat is giving me all this homework to go out and find some other guests around some other topical areas too. I will take that one on and see if I can go, uh, con some other PMs at Microsoft into Yes. Hopping on and chatting with us.
There you go. Yeah, next week. Mayra part two from a secret guest. Mm, suspenseful . There you go. All right, we'll leave it at that. Thanks Ben. All. Right, sounds good. Thanks Scott. We'll talk to you next week. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us to address on the show or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website, Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.