Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

All tech grunts know an update from a vendor can be good news, bad news, or both. Fortunately, there’s a quick way to tell even before the first sentence of the community blog post that is today's royal proclamation of choice. If the person addressing the community is an engineer, it’s good news. If marketing, not so much. …

[Cloudy Day]

Competition authorities are closing in…

You know that Active Directory service you had MSFT…. that was clearly market dominant? Seems you have been using it to force customers to stand up an Azure footprint if they want to use your other monopoly products, like M365.

MSFT response: oh noooooooo. These customers been standing up an ENTRA service. Nothing AT ALL to do with Azure or AD…..

[MyffyW]

Re: Competition authorities are closing in…

"....scales faster than an Oracle invoice after an audit"

Yes, that's why I still come here. Love you awesome nerds.

[NoneSuch]

Entra the Dragon

That is all.

[cmdrklarg]

Re: Entra the Dragon

You have offended my family, and you have offended the Sharepoint Temple!

[Howard Sway]

Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

Looks like the IBM product and service renaming disease has fully taken root in Microsoft too. Next month it'll be Entra 365. Then eCloud Identity Series. Then iNFO Enable Suite. Then..............

[Refugee from Windows]

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

Still what I'd call a bad concept anyway, no matter what you call it.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

But the people who know still call IBM Spectrum Protect by the name Tivoli Storage Manager. And many of the underlying tools still start have references to the previous incarnation, Adstar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM).

Ditto Spectrum Scale (aka GPFS, or MMFS [Multi-Media File System], or even TigerShark [some tools are still called ts...]), and System Mirror PowerHA (HACMP). Names tend to persist in technical circles.

When talking about documentation, unless Microsoft is going to tear through the API, you can probably get away with a comment in the introduction to your documentation, at least in the short term, along the lines of "The product previously known as Azure AD has been renamed by Microsoft as Entra. For all references to Azure AD, read Entra."

The only time I use an IBM tool's 'proper' name is when I'm talking to a marketing or licensing droid.

[IHateWearingATie]

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

You're mistaken. Marketers are droids. Licensers are devils or demons.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

They should have gone the "musician formerly known as Prince" way and used a glyph!

[david 12]

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

service renaming disease

Enteritis

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

With Entra, don't forget the Extra licensing cost

[Roger Greenwood]

Press <enter> to continue

or did you mean press <return>?

The smallest names matter, and it costs (in many ways) to change. Great article.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Press <enter> to continue

No, the <enter> key has been replaced by an arrow symbol that is copyright MSFT and can only be shown on a Microsoft keyboard

[localzuk]

"If you’re building something new, you name a lot of its internals after the whole thing."

Hence why Config Manager still refers to most of its services as SMS, even though it has changed names a half dozen times.

[43300]

Re: "If you’re building something new, you name a lot of its internals after the whole thing."

Intune went to Endpoint Manager and now seems to have gone back again, leading to all kinds of confusion if you don't know that they are the same thing as the two terms seem to be used at random!

[Alistair]

Re: "If you’re building something new, you name a lot of its internals after the whole thing."

...... Middle level executive completely and utterly confused when told that there was no *need* to compare PROD_A from company to PROD_b from company..... simply could not wrap their MBA around the idea that the company had just changed the name.

I think I've hit that wall at least 8 times in my career in IT. And in *every* single case it was an recently graduated MBA at Director or higher who had been imported to the business. {i.e. 0 past telecoms experience}

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: "If you’re building something new, you name a lot of its internals after the whole thing."

How many people know what Microsoft Fabric relates to?

[43300]

"That’s why, when Microsoft needed to put identity management into the cloud, it decided to retain the Active Directory name in Azure AD, despite it being a bad fit and the two products doing quite different things. "

But that's not the case - they don't do "quite different things". Both of them are basically user and device management systems, and with a hybrid tenant the same accounts can exist in both.

Giving them related names makes far more sense than using "Outlook" for an email client programm and a consumer email service, or using "Teams" for a corporate collaboration platform and a consumer chat program.

[thondwe]

A Directory is NOT an ID

Key word is "Directory" which is what both AD and Azure AD are. The problem is that MS have done this...

Azure Active Directory (becoming Microsoft Entra ID)

So rebranding a Directory (set of user/device IDs and groups) as a an ID!

Marketing not talking to technical??

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: A Directory is NOT an ID

Hey, this is the cloud, there is nothing left to be managed by technical people, is it?

[John Hawkins]

Entra - from the prefix 'entero-'?

Entero-:

Prefix referring to the intestine, as in enteropathy (a disease of the intestine) and enterospasm (a painful, intense contraction of the intestine).

[MyffyW]

Re: Entra - from the prefix 'entero-'?

'twas exactly what this Biologist manqué thought - certainly doesn't sound nice

[Alistair]

Re: Entra - from the prefix 'entero-'?

Soooo in the future when MS Azure has serious problems with login failures they can honestly say that the cloud $h@7 the bed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Entra - from the prefix 'entero-'?

Prefix referring to the intestine

And this is precisely why MS are going to go the Oracle route and rename their licensing process 'Rear Entra'...

<coughs>

[dmesg]

Re: Entra - from the prefix 'entero-'?

typing "enteric" at DuckDuckGo gets you this:

enteric

ĕn-tĕr′ĭk

adjective

1. Of, relating to, or being within the intestine.

2. Of or pertaining to the enteron, or alimentary canal; intestinal.

3. Typhoid fever.

Sounds about right. When the marketers realize what they've done they'll have to change it again. Might I suggest "Nova"?

[Kev99]

All one needs to do is look at the predominance of Stupid Useless Vehicles in the motor vehicle market and lack of sedans and coupes to see how poorly the marketing geniuses understand the end users.

[Peter Gathercole]

The ones that annoy me are the vehicles where they've taken a small family hatch back, put big wheels on to make them taller, and large skirts or bulging body trim to make them look 'butch', but left much of the mechanics and interior fit the same.

So you come up to one, and see a tall car with a large footprint, and then you climb in, and it's just as small and cramped as the original vehicle they adapted! What is the point!

[Michael Wojcik]

Yes. I can't figure out how Volvo made my wife's XC60 SUV basically as long and wide as my XC70 estate, and taller, yet it seems to have both less passenger room and less cargo space. It's like a reverse TARDIS – much smaller on the inside.

[David 132]

Automatic thumbs up for a fellow XC70 owner (and yes, I also had an XC60 at one point but sold it to a family member!)

[h0bbes]

Meaningless Product Rename

This is just like the renaming of "Yammer" to "Viva Engage". What improvements or new features did the rename include? None. It has remained the same steaming hot mess of a messaging platform.

[Mr D Spenser]

Re: Meaningless Product Rename

By ditching the AD moniker for ID they are able to ditch having to replicate in the cloud all the features they currently support on prem. Besides, you won't need to track those physical devices anymore because all your compute devices will be Azure cloud instances.

[Crypto Monad]

Re: Meaningless Product Rename

> By ditching the AD moniker for ID they are able to ditch having to replicate in the cloud all the features they currently support on prem

I don't think they ever did replicate them in Azure AD. They had a completely separate product called "Azure AD Domain Services", where they basically spun up some VMs of Windows Server to act as your domain controller.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Meaningless Product Rename

And "Yammer" means annoying, so at least the old name was fitting. "Viva Engage" is just twice the stupid with half the semantic content.

[David 132]

Re: Meaningless Product Rename

Honestly, "Viva Engage" sounds like a Trekkie being ironic as he starts up his 70's-era Vauxhall.

And yes I know Vauxhall recently re-used the name. What next, the 2024 Ford Anglia?

[Norman Nescio]

Subscription service...

Given that Entra will be a subscription service for managing identities that will no doubt have some kind of legal permission-to-use associated with the rent being charged, I suggest that we give it its full name:

Entra Identity Licensing Service

Or Entrails, for short. I wonder if the haruspicy is good?

[Franco]

Great prescience from the BOFH's recent column on giving employess useless tat WTCLOI (with the company logo on it for anyone who didn't read the column) instead of a bonus. You would think in the current climate with companies desperate to prove their sustainable green credentials that a massive rebrand and a mass clear out of branded promotional items would be a thing of the past, never mind the pointless amounts of money spent on the marketing people who came up with this and all the graphic designers etc doing new logos and banners, and that's before you consider the cost to all the customers of re-writing their documentation and updating their websites to reflect the name change.

MS are far from alone in this (I hate to think how much money Standard Life Aberdeen spent to become Abrdn for example) but it really needs to stop when it serves no purpose and techies will contine to use the old name anyway.

[Brad Ackerman]

IBM systems never stopped having planars.

[Michael Wojcik]

And Winchester drives, as you can see on these foils.

[dinsdale54]

The quality of a product is inversely proportional to how often it is renamed.

I can't really think of any counterexamples from my working career.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but some good shitty examples are the ones where the download page for updates uses the new name (or in my case, number) which is based on the current year, and the license download page for the same software uses the old name (or in my case, number) which is based on the number of major releases that they've produced. Salesmen, please shoot them on sight and don't let them change anything.

Also, don't name your company such that Salesforce (Dear god, please send a flood, a tornado, and the plagues to Salesforce) tickets show newly opened tickets as "Waiting on Progress", which, to be honest, always elicits statements like "no shit sherlock" or "still?" or "again?".

[dmesg]

Bands and Brands

I had a friend long ago (and kinda far away) who told me about a band he was in, way back in high school. They were so bad, they changed the band name after every gig because they could never get a second booking with the same name. Anywhere in town. Word traveled.

[Strahd Ivarius]

One of the best MS product is indeed the "pre-Windows 2000 account name", aka sAMAccountName, that managed to slip unnoticed in the cloud product formerly know as Azure Active Directory

[sebacoustic]

find ${SRC} --exec sed -i -E -e 's/AD/Entra/g' {} \;

what could possibly go wrong?

[David 132]

Well for one, it could end REALLY BENTRALY [sic].

(i.e., the infamous "clbuttic mistake" beckons.)

[ecofeco]

But it goes to 11, see?

AD, then Azure, then Azure AD, then InTune, now Entra.

So is Entra, Spinal Tap Latin for eleven?

[xyz]

Steve Balmer...

My PTSD has just come back.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Steve Balmer...

Have a chair!

[steviebuk]

Hate it

I want to retire. Starting to hate the IT corporate world now. Still have an interest in the history of IT but this cloud bollocks is annoying me and then this. Just leave it a fucking lone.

Had enough, sadly can't do anything else, its all I know and retirement won't happen till I'm dead.

Fun.

[43300]

Re: Hate it

The bigggest problem with the cloud bollocks and all that flows from it (particularly the programs like the MS Office suite which hook into cloudy things and update themselves as and when they feel like it), is the total lack of stability and proper control. Granted there has always been an element of this with Microsoft particularly, but when everything was on-prem, the updates were once a month, could be controlled through WSUS, and were separate rahter than a combined lump at least you could decide when to install them, and if something broke, usually work out which specific update it was and remove it again.

In these current days of perpetual beta they can fuck up anything at any time, and it can be difficult or impossible for IT admins to do anything about it. Plus everything is so sneaky - e.g turning on the options for users to sign up for trials, by default and with no global way for the admin to perpetually turn off all current and future trials - they each have to be done individually, and new ones will appear automatically enabled. Or hooking things together so that one part of the 365 suite won't work properly unless another part is also enabled, and so on.

[dmesg]

Re: Hate it

But at least MS sometimes does the admins a favor by making the platform completely unavailable to users.

[Blackjack]

So... Twitter becoming X.com is a lot of work for whatever coders haven't quit the company?