Microsoft Adds Basic Tier For Azure Active Directory

Microsoft released a new tier for Azure Active Directory on Monday intended for enterprise customers who want to provide their "deskless" employees access to cloud-based software and services.

Azure Active Directory Basic, which offers some of the management features recently released in Active Directory Premium, is now available for volume licensing purchase. Active Directory allows Microsoft's cloud customers to manage users, groups and access to applications and services, including Office 365 and other SaaS products.

"Today our customers want to give all their employees accounts in Azure AD (which we're very excited about) and to manage their employees access to a broad range of cloud-based SaaS apps," wrote Alex Simons, director of program management on Microsoft's Active Directory Team, in the company's blog.

[ Related: Microsoft Adds New Data Services For Developers To Azure]

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That includes employees who don't work in traditional offices, use personal computers or typically access corporate applications -- workers often found in retail environments.

Azure AD Basic is "built specifically for these employees and the types of work they do," Simons wrote.

Microsoft launched Azure Active Directory, a comprehensive identity and access management service, as a free offering for Azure users in April 2013. Last April, the software developer unveiled the Premium tier, offering a slew of new features and functionality for enterprise users.

The Basic offering incorporates some of the premium features that are relevant to managing access for retail employees, including self-service password reset for cloud users, an enterprise-grade SLA that promises 99.9 percent availability for the service and a feature called Company Branding that allows businesses to add their logos and color schemes to sign-in and access-panel pages.

The list price for the Basic edition is $1 per user per month, with standard Microsoft volume licensing discounting available.

Mary Hester, CEO of LAN Systems, an Atlanta-based managed services provider and Microsoft Gold partner since 2008, told CRN the game changer for the channel is that the pay Active Directory tiers are being sold as volume-licensing products.

"Being able to sell through volume licensing really means the channel can sell it and support it. It makes it so that being sold through the partner channel is so much easier and gives us as a Microsoft partner much more flexibility," Hester said.

Hester said she is excited about the new Active Directory features she can offer SMB clients and "really all the features that are coming into Azure."

"There are so many possibilities that we've only scratched the surface, especially with small and midsize companies, about what they can do in the cloud," she said.

Hester told CRN a big-ticket item LAN Systems has been waiting for is a better support model, and it now seems "Microsoft is really concentrated on that and they're really formalizing that model."

"For me, that's the next step for them, because partners have to be able to contact technical support to support the offerings," she said.

Businesses interested in purchasing Azure Active Directory must contact a Microsoft representative for more information.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 15, 2014