News
Azure AD Gets New Capabilities for Microsoft Teams, Azure Portal
- By Kurt Mackie
- June 08, 2017
Microsoft has extended Azure Active Directory's conditional access policies to Microsoft Teams and the Azure Portal, the company announced Tuesday.
Conditional access policies refer to conditions that must be true before access to network resources is permitted. For instance, a device might need to have the latest software updates in place before gaining access to those resources. Other conditions might be the user's location or the user's sign-in risk, which might be factors set under conditional access policies.
Microsoft explained that, until recently, IT pros using the Azure AD service didn't have the ability to set conditional access policies for either Microsoft Teams or the Azure Portal. Now, that capability is available.
IT pros can set conditional access policies for the Azure Portal using that portal. However, Microsoft cautioned that such changes will affect other management solutions as well, such as "classic Azure portal, Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager provider, classic Service Management APIs, as well as PowerShell."
In addition, IT pros making such changes via the Azure Portal could wind up locking themselves out.
"While configuring a policy for Azure portal, be cautious! A bad configuration might lead to you locking yourself out," Microsoft cautioned.
On the Microsoft Teams side, IT pros can use the Microsoft Teams "cloud app for IT admins" to set conditional access policies. (Possibly, Microsoft is referring to the "Office 365 Admin Center," a browser-based administrative portal, as described in this support document.) Microsoft Teams is the company's newest collaboration solution for Office 365 users.
The announcement added that if other conditional access policies have been set for applications other than Microsoft Teams, then they'll take effect, too.
"It's important to note that Conditional Access policies created for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online cloud apps also affect Microsoft Teams as the Teams clients rely heavily on these services for core productivity scenarios such as meetings, calendars and files," the announcement explained.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.