Azure Management Portal

Management portal was released in year 2012 and it allows you to provision instances of services, infrastructure or apps instantly. It displays all your applications and services deployed on Azure and also allow you to manage them. Azure Management Portal works good on pc, laptops and to some extent on tablets but not on phone and that might be just one of the reason for the new azure management portal.

Azure Preview Portal

Azure Preview portal came out in 2014 and its build for responsive layout so that it can be used on tablets and phones. The latest Azure Preview portal is designed for DevOps which provide a visual dashboard to monitor your services and applications.

Highlights

Azure Hubs

Hub is a central place for all the standard functionality grouped together which are used horizontally across azure services. For example Notification Hub where you get all the alerts about your system operations and tasks. Similarly the Browse hub where one can browse through all the services available  

Journeys

Journey is like ALT+TAB for your cloud operating system where you can switch between your different applications and services.  

Customizing the Azure UI

You can have a personalized view of the dashboard just like windows 8 tiles.

Azure Console

You also have a very interesting feature which is the console to play around with simple commands. You can also use powershell commands.  

Visual Studio Online Integration in the Azure portal

You can also manage your project and the team building your application. You can plan and schedule your work and you can also track progress of your team.  

Analytics

Understanding your customer is critical to success. So this portal gives you variety of insights for your customer.  

Finances

It also helps you to manage your finances by providing all the details and visualization of projected spends in the dashboard.     Each portal can be accessed using specific URLs.  

Azure Preview Portal Improvements

Here are the new set of improvement to the Azure Preview Portal announced by Leon Welicki.   Related Videos: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Azure-Friday/Overview-of-the-new-Azure-Portal-with-Vishal-Joshi/player?h=540&w=960 http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Cloud+Cover/Episode-139-Exploring-the-New-Azure-Portal