One great feature of Office 365 that many may not be aware of is the partner admin center. This gives Office 365 deployment partners who meet specific requirements the ability to have a connection into their customers Office 365 tenant with the customers permission. I have the ability to send a customer a link that will allow them to grant me access into their Office 365 tenant using my own Office 365 credentials, making it much easier for me to do deployment and support work for them.

Recently Microsoft announced some new features for the Office 365 partner admin center. This morning I logged into my Office 365 tenant and saw this message

The “What’s new in the Partner admin center.” Link at the bottom is not functional for me as of this writing. This article won’t go live on my site for a few more days, so it’s possible that link is working properly by the time you read this.

As of this writing, I’m not sure that the filtering is working properly. Clicking on the filter icon gives you three options; “None”, “Flagged”, and “Recently Accessed”. “Recently Accessed” seems to work as expected for me showing me tenants that I have recently accessed via this portal. “Flagged” is empty by default. Once you flag a specific customer tenant it will show in this view. “None”, however, should show all customers tenants to which your partner tenant has been granted access. Currently it shows nothing for me. Since I can see “nothing” by closing my eyes, I fail to see the point of a filter setting that gives this same result. I would have expected “None” to show an unfiltered view of all the customer tenants to which I have access. You can search for customers by name using the spy glass icon next to the filter icon.

Looking past the minor filtering S.N.A.F.U., these are positive improvements to the usability of the partner admin center. Hopefully they make your Office 365 deployment experience a little bit easier.

P.S.

As I expect to be very busy ensuring my aluminum pole is properly unadorned, this is going to be my last blog post of 2014. As such, I would just like to take a minute to ask that no matter what set of rituals you choose to perform please just try to be decent to one another. If we can pull that one off, everything else will be gravy.

Wishing you all the best in 2015, and may you be touched by His Noodly Appendage,

Nathan