Microsoft Working on New Exchange Admin Center

[avatar user="Jamie Poindexter" size="thumbnail" align="left" link="attachment" /]byJamie Poindexter|Sep 24, 2020|Jamie's Tech Corner,Our blogIf you are an admin for Office 365 you might be interested in checking out the new exchange admin center that Microsoft is working on. Microsoft has started notifying users of the new admin center and giving the users the chance to check it out. As they usually do new features are not always available to everyone at the same time but if you see this banner you are one of the lucky ones.

You may also notice a new slider in the upper right to enable the new admin center

Microsoft seems to be working on moving the exchange admin center look and feel to match the admin portal. Individual buttons on the nav bar are replaced with drop downs to group the items.

The main options are all there, one so far have noticed has not been migrated is the mail flow rules that existed in the old admin center

Clicking the more features and then transport rules takes you back to the old admin center so hopefully soon that will be added to the new admin center as well.One of the main perks to using the exchange admin center over the main admin portal is changes are reflected almost immediately in the UI. Adding users to groups for instance can take several minutes if added through the main portal but in the exchange admin they are shown right away and allow you to fix any errors. Hopefully, this will be fixed as well on the new admin center.On the flip side, one of the main issues I had with the classic admin center was it was slow to load pages and subject to time outs. In my testing though the new admin center seems to be responsive though this also will require more time before we can be sure that is the case. Another feature that Microsoft added was the ability to add cards to the home page for viewing things such as total incoming or outgoing emails. However not matter what browser I used I always got the “Failed to save layout” when adding the custom cards. As you can see its still new so things will continue to get better and better and eventually replace the old exchange admin center.