Its was the 2nd day of //BUILD 2014, Scott Guthrie gave a keynote about the new Azure enhancements and features that will be released on the day. Later the new Microsoft Azure Management Portal is launched with a much excited look and feel and more advanced dashboard to customize the tiles and pin it accordingly. As everyone I am totally excited to get my hands on with the new portal which gives more appealing look and feel for the end users.

To access the new portal, navigate to www.portal.azure.com, though still the old portal will remain active till the new one gets more productive. Login with your Azure subscription to the above a link and you can see the new portal get loaded for the first time.

Its the first time accessing to the portal, just accept to the terms by simple clicking on the Get Started button then the new Portal loads in style with the rich UI and easy accessible Dashboard which styles the Modern UI which tells that Microsoft primary focus on UI with the Modern design that’s been used across the different Microsoft products.

Each of the UI element are separate tiles, which can be customized to different tile sizes, and option to pin or remove from the Dashboard view etc. Resizing the tile view can be done with Small, Medium and Normal options by simply right clicking on the component which you need to resize and selecting the customizing option.

The most exciting view is the Gallery view which shows the list of Azure components and the the respective recommendations for each of the component from Microsoft and from third party providers. In the previous version we had the list completely available without any categorization, but with the new portal its been nicely categorized and shows the publisher information as well. Navigating between the components the respective services are nicely showcased, through which the user can easily look out for the one’s needed.

The navigation is quite clean and neat and more impressive with the responsiveness, and its a single node navigation closing the top node will close the remaining and will need to navigate from the beginning but the last node can be closed and reverse navigation is quite positive. The next most awesome feature is the Service health of the components region wise with the nice UI showcasing which are the components are active on the selected regions.

These are some of the new features which immediately gets on my mind to showcase in this blog post, look our for this space to see more of the features that will be discussed in detail.