The big news this week is that we’ve drastically simplified the customer onboarding experience – it’s now easier to use, faster, and more reliable.

Simplified Onboarding Experience

We’ve updated the onboarding wizard that you use to add customers into Cloud User Hub. We no longer inject a guest account into each tenant, instead using the administrator permissions of the main service account. This change means that you’ll no longer run into issues where the customer tenant has restrictions on whether or how guest accounts can be used.

In addition, we now transparently select all solutions when onboarding tenants. Some solutions, such as Exchange Online PowerShell, still require additional activation, but the majority of solutions will be immediately available after a tenant is onboarded.

The limit on the number of tenants that you can concurrently onboard has also been removed, and the onboarding process is more asynchronous, so you can select the customers that you want onboarded, and then leave the wizard to do its work and receive notifications as the onboarding completes.

The onboarding process is now three simple steps: firstly, if you have not already done so, you must create a service account that Cloud User Hub will use for interacting with Microsoft. Secondly, you authenticate to the Partner Center twice, and to the Microsoft Graph API once, in order to grant Cloud User Hub all the access that it requires. Finally, you select the customers that you wish to onboard.

Note that we’re also working on a new onboarding experience that will unify the Microsoft onboarding process across N-able, and uses Microsoft’s new GDAP (Granular Delegated Admin Privileges) model. We’re expecting this new experience to be available very early in 2023.

Company Name

We now load the company name from the Partner Center and can reload the value as required (e.g. if a company name changes, perhaps via a merger or acquisition). To trigger a refresh of the name, you need to reconfigure the Microsoft Partner Center Management solution.

Performance Improvements

We’ve improved the performance of the Command Block listing pages, and also added some additional caching across the application. We’re continuing to work on further performance improvements, particularly for our partners outside of Europe.