Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We use it mainly for our Office 365 files. The integration between the two is interesting. It's been a learning curve.

Overall, it's not a very intuitive solution.

When you have an Office 365 enterprise subscription, it comes with Azure Active Directory. We don't have a subscription to Active Directory, but our Active Directory connector puts our credentials into the Azure Active Directory. On the Office 365 side, we're also in the GCC high 365, so it's a lot more locked down. There are a few things that aren't implemented which make things frustrating. I don't blame the product necessarily, but there are links and things within there that still point back to the .com-side and not the .us-side.

There's a security portal and a compliance portal. They're being maintained, but one's being phased in and the others are being phased out. Things continue to change. I guess that's good, but it's just been a bit of a learning curve.

Our Office 365 subscriptions are tied to our on-prem domain — I have a domain admin there. With our Active Directory connector, our on-prem credentials are being pushed to the cloud. We also have domain credentials in the cloud, but there's no Office subscription tied to it, just to do the administration stuff. I moved my sync credential to have a lot more administrative privileges. Some of the documentation I was reading clearly showed that when you have this particular ability right on the Azure side, and then you have another ability on the Office side, that intuitively, the Microsoft cloud knows to give you certain rights to be able to do stuff. They're just kind of hidden in different places.

Some things are in Exchange, and some things are in the Intune section. We had a few extra light subscriptions that weren't being used, so I gave my microsoft.us admin account a whole other subscription. In the big scheme of things, it's roughly $500 a year additionally — it just seems like a lot. I didn't create a mailbox for that and I was trying to do something in Exchange online and it said I couldn't do it because I didn't have a mailbox.

You can expect a different user experience between on-prem and online. Through this cloud period, we have premiere services, we have a premiere agreement and we had an excellent engineer help us with an exchange upgrade where we needed a server. We needed an OS upgrade and we needed the exchange upgrade on the on-prem hybrid server. We asked this engineer for assistance because my CIO wanted to get rid of the on-prem exchange hybrid server, but everything that I was reading was saying that you needed to keep it as long as you had anything on-prem. We asked the engineer about it and he said, "Yeah, you want to keep that." In his opinion, it was at least going to be two years. So at least I got my CIO to stop talking about that. It's just been an interesting time in this transition between on-prem and in the cloud.

In a secure environment, a lot of this stuff is PowerShell, which is fine. It's a learning curve, but if you don't use it all time, then it's a lot of back and forth with looking at the documentation and looking at other blogs. If you're in a secure environment, the Windows RM (remote management) stuff can be blocked, and that's frustrating, too.

I have been using this solution for roughly five months.

It's definitely both stable and scalable. I used to work in an environment where we had a couple of onsite engineers from Microsoft and I worked on Active Directory — I did that for four years. We did the Active Directory health check, so I actually worked with the engineer for a week and went through our Active Directory. At the time, Microsoft said it was one of the top five most complicated forests out there. We had 150,000 users and 18 domains across the globe supporting the military, so it was pretty big. 

We have experience with their premier support. We have a live audit coming up shortly so we don't have a lot of time to waste, waiting for support to get back to us — unless it's very critical. 

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, so I cannot comment on that. 

We used an integrator, however, we don't speak of his name anymore. 

I think we're on the E3 — I think it was about 35 dollars per user. We may go up to the E5, which includes Project Online and the telecom service in TEAMS. We're in the process of rolling out Office 365 internally. We've had really great feedback that people really like TEAMS and we want to move there. 

We had a roadmap meeting with Microsoft a few months ago. Some of the more accessible types of things were on the roadmap for the first quarter of this year. I know that Microsoft's working hard at listening to their customers, especially through COVID. Collaboration has changed. They also have military folks, that's why they created the GCC High. Once they got into the GCC high, they're like, "Oh, we need to collaborate a little bit more." So they've been pushing a little bit more on integration. We're not going to have that kind of clout where I am, but where I used to work, we would've. 

Overall, I would give Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium a rating of four out of ten. They could really benefit from some better user-training. 

We primarily use the solution only for the employees. It offers a single sign-on to business applications. Internal modern applications also go through Azure Active Directory, however, we use Active Directory for the legacy ones. (Kerberos).

It takes a couple hours to add SSO to new business SaaS. The Azure AD Marketplace has all the applications we bought so far as built-in templates.

The single sign-on of the solution is the most valuable aspect.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution offers good bundles that include Office 365. 

The pricing is pretty decent.

The product is pretty user-friendly and offers good customization capabilities.

We find that most of the new features are in preview for too long. It gives you the announcement that there's a new feature and yet, most of the time, it takes more than one year to have it generally available. Often we have to go and sometimes just use a preview without support. 

We cannot run all the configurations from the APIs. I would like to have something that has code and to just be able to back up and apply my configuration. Right now, we are managing more Azure tenants. It's hard to keep all of those configurations at the same level, the same value.

We would like to have more granularity in the Azure conditional access in order to be able to manage more groups for applications. That way, when adding a new applications I don't have multiple conditional access to modify. 

One of the main requests from our security team is the MFA challenge. Azure, by default, is more user-friendly. We have a lot of debates with the security team here as the MFA doesn't pop up often enough for them. From an end-user perspective, it's a better user experience, as users generally prefer fewer pop-ups, however, security doesn't like it. It's hard for security to add. 

We don't have Azure Premium P2 yet, however, most of the advanced security features are in the P2, and it costs a lot more money.

I've been using the solution for four years at this point.

The solution is relatively stable. The only issue we have is that there's a lot of things on Azure that are synchronous. Sometimes it takes time for changes to apply, and it kind of depends on the time of the day. A lot of the time we're happy with it, however, sometimes it creates a bizarre issue that is difficult to troubleshoot.

The solution is quite stable. If an organization needs to expand it out, they can do so rather easily.

We have about 9,000 people in our organization using the solution.

While the technical support is good, you need premium support. The standard support is more for small enterprises. We have the premium support and with the premium support, it's much better. There's a direct line to the correct type of support. It's very good.

We previously used SiteMinder from Computer Associates. The main reason we migrated to Azure was for the integration with Office 365. It then became our primary authentication source for the employees.

The initial setup is not too complex. It's pretty straightforward.

We didn't need the assistance of an integrator, reseller or consultant for deployment. We were able to handle everything in-house.

The pricing is really great and Office 365 packages are good. We don't pay for it separately. It's included in our package and the APIs are really great. I'm not sure of the exact cost of Azure. It's a package deal.

We've looked into Okta for B2B and B2C clients, not necessarily for our internal employees.

We're just a customer.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I would recommend the solution for employees. It's a really great tool. However, we tried it also for consumers, for clients for B2B and B2C. For me, it isn't really a great production product. We researched Okta for that.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Microsoft Authenticator is a third-party application used to authenticate users in our Microsoft environment, such as accessing emails or applications like Excel, Word, or any other application. It is also used for online login purposes. The configuration process is simple from the admin side; we just need to enable it for the user. The user will receive a notification on their mobile device and then needs to download the Microsoft Authenticator app. They can add their account by entering their username and password. Once this is done, the configuration is complete.

While using any applications in the environment, users need to authenticate using Microsoft Authenticator. They will receive a one-time password that expires in thirty seconds, which they must use for authentication. One advantage of using Microsoft Authenticator is that it ensures the security of user accounts. Even if someone tries to hack or authenticate into another person's Microsoft account, they will be unable to do so without the password. The user will receive a notification if someone attempts to access their account and can choose whether to grant them access or not. If any unauthorized access is detected, we will investigate to identify the person behind the authentication attempt.

Microsoft Authenticator is highly secure. It is connected to its own servers. Using this application employs encryption methods, and the user has the right to access it. Additionally, we can utilize the biometric fingerprint tool for authentication, ensuring that only one person has access to it. This feature is extremely beneficial.

The cost of licensing always has room for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Authenticator for three years.

Microsoft Authenticator is scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. We downloaded it from the Google Play store and used a name and password. That's all it takes, and we're ready to go. The configuration duration is set on an admin site, but the actual configuration must be done on the end devices themselves. This can include mobile devices, tablets, or any other device that we can use, and takes about ten minutes to complete.

We have observed a 60 percent return on investment with Microsoft Authenticator, which provides us with peace of mind, knowing that there is no unauthorized access occurring.

Microsoft Authenticator is included in the package when we purchase a license from Microsoft.

I rate Microsoft Authenticator ten out of ten.

We have 120 users. The solution is used daily and is required whenever a Microsoft account needs authentication to ensure that only the data owner or email owner has the proper authentication to access the mailbox or application.

I will advise people to continue using the Microsoft Authenticator because it provides security and data protection. From a cybersecurity perspective, it is beneficial to use the Microsoft Authenticator for the authentication of Microsoft products.

The solution strengthened our security posture by providing fine-grained access based on attributes, standardized names, and values. Azure AD reduced our time to market for products based on improved security.

The product also improved our service desk overhead.

Azure AD positively affected our end-user experience via reduced time to market, being an identity product for our workforce.

Privileged Identity Management (PIM), managed identities, dynamic groups, and extension and security attributes are all great features.

Better integration with external governance products would be a welcome addition to Azure AD. 

We've been using the solution for four years.

The solution is stable but can be improved, especially regarding response times.

Azure AD is a cloud-based solution operating from a worldwide tenant, so scalability isn't an issue, especially from an identity perspective. We have 300,000 total end users. 

We have yet to interact with technical support, so I can't speak to that.

We previously used standard AD. 

The setup is mixed; the startup is fast, but configuring requires the knowledge of a consultant or technical resource. Basic deployment can be completed in a day, but our greenfield deployment took a relatively long time as we're a large organization. A greenfield deployment should take at most two weeks, but implementing Azure AD into a functional environment is a project unto itself. It could take months, depending on the use cases.

Regarding maintenance, we're a global organization, and each feature has its own operating team. At our scale, a group of 25 is responsible for managing and maintaining the identity part of the solution.

The pricing depends on the use case and can be negotiated based on volume. 

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

My advice to others evaluating the product is to do good due diligence beforehand to determine a clear set of requirements, as with any identity tool or access management solution.  

The primary use cases are task tracking and technical documentation, but I'm a project manager, so I also use the product for other jobs.

We have around 15 total users, with a couple of admins.

The boards for task tracking are a valuable feature. 

Azure AD is a turnkey solution; it provides many features for developers to use in one place.

Many of the features are outdated, so the UI and UX could be improved. 

The wiki is hard to use as it's more of a repository for technical information, but when I'm writing a PRD, I need more tools for writing. 

It would be good if the UI were more visually appealing, as it looks dated compared to other products on the market. It works fine for the dev team, but the navigation could be improved, especially for managers.

I've been using the solution for around two years. 

The stability is okay overall. 

The product is highly scalable; it's enormous and has many features.

I previously used a variety of solutions for task management, including Asana, Teamwork from Microsoft, Jira, and so on. 

I wasn't involved in the deployment; the solution was already in place when I arrived. It doesn't require any maintenance that I'm aware of. 

The product is relatively affordable, especially compared to Okta, a pricey solution.

Azure AD helped save my organization money, as it's a turnkey solution for dev management, though I can't say precisely how much as I'm not involved in the financial side.  

I rate the solution six out of ten. 

I don't use Azure AD's Verified ID, but I'm considering an identity management solution. I'm hesitant about which one to choose, and the choice is between a product from Okta and the one from Azure AD.

I use the Permission Management feature, which I look for when choosing an identity management product, but I'm still in the research phase with this feature.

Most of our staff are okay with the quality of the end-user experience within our organization, but it could be more comfortable to use for managers. It's a challenging solution to implement for every department or team because not everyone likes the UX, and it's pretty outdated when it comes to product document writing. I had an unpleasant experience when we had a power cut, and I lost two pages of documentation, as there is no autosave feature. This is important from a manager's perspective but less so for developers.

For those considering the solution, talk to your dev team to determine if it covers their needs. If so, use it, as it has many features and is very scalable.

We work with Active Directory in our own IT network in our office. We also deploy Active Directory projects in some other clients.

Active Directory is an active directory service from Windows for a Windows Server operating system.

We have synchronized identities on-premise with on-cloud identities in order to work with Microsoft-aligned services such as Office 365 and to work in the middle of hybrid topology for on-prem and cloud identities, as well as to be more productive with other capabilities that Azure Active Directory Premium offers. This includes, for example, single sign-on, multifactor authentication, Conditional Access, privileged access management, and Privileged Identity Management. Our current experience with Azure in the Cloud - Azure Active Directory - is it's very functional and productive in talking about identity and access management solutions.

In the last two years, as COVID has been present worldwide, the Azure Active Directory capabilities have allowed us to work completely in a remote way. It's not fully necessary to work at the office or in only certain locations. We are now fully capable to work from any location, any place in the world.

The most important thing about this solution is the capabilities for multifactor authentication and single sign-on that it offers for native Microsoft solutions and non-native Microsoft solutions.

The solution has features that have helped improve our security posture. Azure Active Directory works with some technologies around security such as mobile device management, mobile application management, and Azure Information Protection as well as Conditional Access and multifactor authentication. These capabilities give us a good level of security.

The solution has affected our end-user experience. For example, we work with several technologies in the Cloud, such as Salesforce. Azure Active Directory allows us to work within a single sign-on model. This allows us to work more easily, and not have to remember a bunch of different passwords for various applications. With a single sign-on, we can work in a more transparent way and we can be more productive, having direct access to our applications in the cloud.

Microsoft is working with Microsoft Identity Manager for Active Directory on-premise. It will be very important to have these identity management solutions directly in Azure Active Directory. It's very important to have some kind of Azure identity manager as a technology for identity and access management for working both in the cloud and inside the Azure suite.

I've been using the solution for the last 15 years or so. 

We have the service running all the time and it runs and works without an issue. Up until now, we have not had any problems at all in terms of the availability of the service.

We know that if we need to integrate more than hundreds or thousands of users, we know this won't be a problem. We have about 80 users in the Azure Active Directory right now, however, we know that if it was necessary to scale it for hundreds or thousands of users, it wouldn't be a problem.

We've contacted technical support several times over the last ten or so years. 

Microsoft is a very big, important company. People working in technical support have been very professional and quick to respond. They're very good specialists.

This is the first product that I consider as it is a powerful directory service and better than what any other company offers.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We've worked with Azure Active Directory for the last three or four years and find it very easy to deploy. It might take maybe three days. 

In terms of maintenance, we only have a couple of people dedicated to offering technical support. Once you deploy it, it's not necessary to give too much support after that.

I know that there are several other solutions, for example, Open LDAP, et cetera. I like the functionalities that Microsoft Active Directory offers. Therefore, it was not necessary to test any other technology.

I'm pretty sure that one of the main advantages of Microsoft Active Directory is that not only does it provide user management, it's also a technology component inside of a very big strategy for technology in any environment or company. It's native. Users can have their own mailbox for Exchange or Office 365. Active Directory is integrated as a way of authentication for any other database or web service. The main advantage is that it's integrated into a whole global authentication strategy.

I am a Microsoft-certified systems engineer. I've been doing this for the last 22 years.

I'm a partner and reseller. We work with several specialists for deploying, project management, and development of solutions around Microsoft technologies.

For any customer or any client that is interested in deploying Azure Active Directory to have a full strategy for hybrid environments. They need to take into account users on-premise and users and resources in the cloud in order to have an integrated architecture and solution to best utilize the Azure Active Directory capabilities.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

My primary use case with Azure Active Directory is configuring applications, for example Edge, on premises and doing synchronizations with ADFS in a hybrid environment.

I have used it in a lot of application integrations. I set authentication for the hybrid and cloud applications for the services that we acquire.

The feature that I have found most valuable is its authentication security. That is Azure Active Directory's purpose - making cloud services' security and integration easier.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say its interface is not very flexible, as opposed to AWS.

The services are very clear, but the user admin interface needs to be better. That's all.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for more than five years.

In terms of stability, sometimes the more applications you integrate, the more it becomes a little bit unstable. The synchronization engine is key because that's what 365on-premises is for. The main thing that Azure supports is Microsoft native 365 and the other services that come with it.

It is scalable. It is just that Microsoft likes complex licensing. They should make it more  straightforward.

We just have the admins using it, that's about 20 people.

Microsoft tech support is not the best, but they're okay.

The initial setup is not that complex. Maybe I'm the wrong person to ask, though, because I am already an old AD person and I understand it.

On a scale of one to ten, I would not rate Azure Active Directory as a bad product, I would rate it as an 8.

The solution is a hybrid cloud with connectors into Azure/Microsoft 365 cloud.

I am still figuring out the whole on-prem/Azure Active Directory Premium/Microsoft 365 integrations and administrative connections.

The scalability of the solution is good.

Technical support can be helpful.

It's not intuitive and we use it mainly for our hybrid capability now and are expanding our footprint in Microsoft 365. The integration between on-prem and Online is interesting. However, the learning curve is high.

When you have an Office 365 enterprise subscription, it comes with Azure Active Directory, however, you don't have an Azure subscription. Yet, all of our active directory connectors put our credentials into the Azure Active Directory. 

There are enough things that aren't implemented on our side and we are in the middle of this transition.  I don't blame the product necessarily for that. However, there are links and items within Microsoft 365 that still point back to the .com side.

Items seem to continue to move, such as security and compliance. Now there's a security portal and a compliance portal, and all three are still being maintained, however, one's being phased in and the others are being phased out. Things continue to change. It's just been a bit to learn. There's a lot to keep track of. There should be a bit more transparency.

The Office 365 subscriptions are a bit confusing with a hybrid environment with what credential has an Microsoft 365 subscription.  However, then some of the documentation I was reading this week was where I ran into a wall. This particular document clearly showed that when you have a particular ability on the Azure side, and then you have another ability on the Office side, intuitively the Microsoft cloud knows to give you certain other rights, to be able to do stuff. This settings and configurations are in different places. Some things are then in the Exchange Online, some things are in the Intune section, etc.

I am not sure if the intent is to have an Microsoft 365 administrator with a second subscription for a cloud admin account or not.  I was trying to do something in Exchange online and received a message that I couldn't do it because I didn't have a mailbox. It's frustrating and confusing at times. There are things like that just are a different user experience between on-prem and online.

The Microsoft Premier Agreement we have has been very beneficial and we have had an excellent experience with a couple of different short cycle projects.

We've been working with the solution for just over a year and I have been involved for the last five months. It's been under a year, and not very long just yet.

The scalability seems to be there.  We are not a very big shop but we have unique needs and requirements.

The premier services we have are very good. We have a contact that's been with Microsoft a while and that's really saved us. The reach back into field engineers and their amazing ability to get the job done have been hugely beneficial.  The Exchange Online engineer we had was worth double what we paid for. It was amazing. If it weren't for that, I am not sure if we would have made our schedule.  Often the timing hasn't lined up, with short notice compliance requirements and implementation constraints due to configuration or version of technology.  They are very responsive, but depending on if it's break fix or planning, the planning side as longer cycles.   

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I can't speak to how long the deployment took or how easy or difficult the process was.

We had assistance with the setup. We're actually bringing in some more help as our needs have short turn cycles and some ageing infrastructure that we still have to move online.

I would say to make sure you have a trusted integration partner or someone on staff that has been through this transition.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

While we use the on-premises model, we also have it synced for hybrid functionality.

With COVID especially, there have been a lot of changes in a lot of companies and a lot of rethinking of processes lately.

We're in the process of rolling out Office 356 internally. We've had really great feedback that people really like Teams, and we want to move more into that area. We had a roadmap meeting with Microsoft a few months ago. It was probably five months ago, four or five months ago.

Some of the more accessible types of items were on the roadmap for the first quarter of this year. However, Microsoft's working hard at listening to customers, especially through the COVID situation that changed a lot of work and priorities. The collaboration stuff has changed. They've been pushing a little bit more on getting some more integrations. We're not going to have that kind of clout where I am, however, where I used to work, we would have. We were the ones that were making sure the Exchange got upgraded and got to the developers.

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten. If the solution offered better transparency/clarity I might rate it higher.