14 DAY TRIAL // An update to the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal has been rolled out and is now available to customers leveraging Microsoft’s Cloud platform. The refresh was announced on July 18th, 2011 by Bharat Ahluwalia, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft, who noted that the revamping was designed to boost user experience in terms of effectiveness and ease of use.
Ahluwalia detailed improvements to Windows Azure Platform Management Portal localization, design, performance, security and deployment deletion.
Customers in no less than 11 markets will be able to leverage the updated Windows Azure Platform Management Portal using their native language.
The Portal now supports: Japanese, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
“Context Menus - To drive a more intuitive user experience, the Portal now supports right click menus in the “Hosted Services, Storage & CDN” pane,” Ahluwalia added.
Performance Improvements - Users can expect to see significantly lower initial load times with the addition of a local temporary cache and the optimization of network bandwidth consumption. When the new portal is first loaded, it will prompt users to increase the local storage amount.
Enhanced Delete Deployment - Developers can now delete running deployments. In earlier versions, developers had to wait for a deployment to stop before it could be deleted. With this new version you can now delete running Windows Azure deployments as well.”
Microsoft has also worked to minimize any associated security risks for customers. As such, the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal no longer keeps any sensitive data in the local store. Customers can always also make use of the browser’s “In private” mode in order to not have a local cache created.
“We are excited about this release and are eager to hear your feedback. Use the feedback button in the bottom right of the Portal to send feedback directly to the team,” Ahluwalia added.