Leon Welicki: Hello there and thank you very much for
joining us in this new Azure Portal How To video. Today, we
learn how to use the Azure Portal home page and we have
Sean Watson for that, who’s going to teach us all about that,
so thank you very much for joining us, Sean.
Sean Watson: Thanks for having me, Leon. Yeah. So, the
Azure Portal home page, we’ve made some updates in the
coming weeks and we’re just going to talk through that and
really give you some tips and tricks on how to make best use
of them.
So when you first land on home, you’ll see that we have these
multiple sections. We have the Azure Services, the recents,
navigate tools, and then you have the useful links, and
our beloved mobile app. One of the big things here, we’ve
tried to really differentiate the two pieces. So, we have Azure
Services and recent resources. That’s more about you and
your usage of the product. And then we have a section, which
is going to be more fixed and something you can really rely
on muscle memory to make use of.
So, let’s dive into the Azure Services. From Azure Services,
I can always get access to the marketplace by a creative
resource, so I can get the full suite of offering of all the
different possible creates that we have. I have up to eight
of my most recently visited services. Now, if you’re new to
the product, these’ll be a featured set, but as you use the
product, this will adapt over time to be the thing that
you’ve most used. And then finally, I have more services.
So, more services is really where I can get access to
everything and that is everything. So from these eight
here, they’re my most recently used, but then at any point
in time, I can really dive into the more services, which is the
all services offering that you have today. And then really see
the full suite of things.
Leon: Perfect. So, the more I use the product, this adjusts
to my usage, but I can still go through the full offering and
find anything else?
Sean: Yeah, exactly. So as you do use the product, this will
adopt to you. But at any point in time, you can come to more
services and get access to everything.
Leon: That sounds great.
Sean: Yeah. So, recent resources, this section may or may not
be there depending on your usage, but as you use the product,
this will populate, and we have a limit of 12 recents we show
here, but you can see here I’ve got a section of recents which
I’ve accessed over the last few minutes but also over the
last few days. And now, we’ll track that over many months
too. So here, I can see that I’ve got virtual machines and
I’ve got app services which I’ve been manipulating and some
of my specs that I’ve been writing recently. This is going to
give you a one click access to the recent resources that
you navigate to very frequently. Now, at any point in time,
load up home, my recent resources are one click away and
I can get straight into what I’m doing.
Leon: So, that will give you like highest productivity, right?
You just get there, if you need to stop that VM or start that VM
or whatever, you go to home, one click away. It’s right there.
Sean: And done, yeah, exactly that.
Moving onto navigate, so navigate is this fixed section, which
we’ve curated base on where people like to actually spend
their time from a sort of repeated use. So, subscriptions,
resource groups, all resources, and my dashboards, I can
always get access to these things. These things that used to
be in the last navigation, and I sort of had one click away,
we’ve made sure that one click away is here too. Tools, the
tools section itself, this is something which is cross cutting.
You can get access to Learn, where you get a whole suite of
free resources from Microsoft, be it learning documentation
and tutorials, and different sort of step through guides.
Azure Monitor, where I can go through and monitor all my
resources, set alerts, and great stuff like that. Security
Center, where I can actually see all of my resources and
which resources are in compliance and which are out and
really take action there and then to make sure I’m secure.
And then cost management, so I can go through and create
budgets, manipulate my costs, and really manage them
and keep them under control.
Leon: Oh, that’s great. And one of the things to mention
in addition of Learn being free and being awesome
is that we are adding learn integration throughout the portal
in many other places, right?
Sean: Yep.
Leon: And the idea is that as you are trying to use Azure and
learn how to use Azure, we put the right content in front of
you, so you can use it effectively and learn effectively.
Sean: Exactly. We want to make sure that bridge is created
as best as we can.
And then useful links, speaking of documentation, there’s
technical documentation links here, but you can also get
links to an expert or be it I want to go and get started
quickly, there’s reference to our Quick Start Center. And
there’s always a place to go find the recent updates like we’re
talking about now.
And then we have our mobile app. We have the mobile app
for iOS and for Android. You can actually get access to the
stores directly from the home page and go and download
the apps.
Leon: Yeah and let us know what you think also. It’s an
awesome app, right?
Sean: Exactly, yeah.
Okay, yeah, so one of the things you may have noticed when
you land on home is that the left navigation is no longer there.
We’ve moved the left navigation to keep the product cleaner
and allow you more focus when you’re actually in the different
experiences and navigate and paste the page. So, at any
point in time if I want to get back to my left navigation, I
can come to the top left and click the hamburger and I’ll see
that familiar left navigation. And I can dive off into my
favorites and the sort of common set of navigate options
that we were talking about earlier.
If pinning this thing is something you desire, you can come
back to the settings page and you can go and change that
setting and you can go back between the dock mode and
the flyout mode at any point in time. If you’re jumping
between large or small resolutions, that’s something you
can quickly get access to.
And then one last piece, you were talking about learning
integration. So, I just want to show you the service cards.
There’ll be a follow up video on the deck of service cards
and the offering that we have here, but I want to briefly
touch upon it. So from home, you can actually hover on any
those recent services and I can get quick access to recent
resources within those services, create and browse but
also some of the free training and other useful links.
Leon: That’s really great and that’s contextual, right?
So, the service we get around training.
Sean: Yep. And that’s part of creating that bridge and
creating a better link between the product and documentation.
Leon: That’s really great. Thank you very much, Sean.
Sean: Thank you.
Leon: And thanks every one of you for watching. Please leave
us a comment on the video. Try all of this and let us know
what you think. Follow us on Twitter. Thanks for watching and
look forward to seeing you in the next video. Thanks.