Entra does the job. Slowly and clunkily. But it does it.
July 15, 2025
Entra does the job. Slowly and clunkily. But it does it.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Entra ID
We have many AD domains hosted on our own hardware and synced with Entra ID primarily to enable SSO with Office 365, but also with various other services.
Being Microsoft, for 365 it is the simple solution. But as with anything Microsoft Cloud, every moment of using it is slow and painful. The website is so unresponsive it is like loading an image gallery on a 28800 modem in the 90s. But it does work.
Being Microsoft, for 365 it is the simple solution. But as with anything Microsoft Cloud, every moment of using it is slow and painful. The website is so unresponsive it is like loading an image gallery on a 28800 modem in the 90s. But it does work.
Pros
- Office 365 SSO
- Easy sync with AD
- Pretty good error logging and reporting.
Cons
- Just the performance of the website. Every page, every click causes physical and emotional pain from my experience. You need to get a coffee between loading pages. Sometimes you click something and aren't even sure it registered because it is so slow to respond.
- MS really don't want people using their own servers and DCs and more, so this will never happen. But it would be good for them to make it possible to sync from multiple DCs concurrently, providing live failover, rather than requiring one to be in staging mode and needing manual intervention if the primary DC is down.
- Honestly I wouldn't say Microsoft Entra ID has had any effect on anything, other than allowing some people to not use password managers because all their important stuff is now SSO. But I don't see that as a positive, because it means for anything unimportant they are no doubt falling into bad habits of password reuse or just writing them down in my opinion.
- I guess because of how bad Office Apps are at randomly unlicensing themselves and needing to be logged in to work, having SSO with users' AD credentials helps resolve that. At least it does now, for years it was unreliable and it wouldn't surprise me if MS break it again to try to get people off local hosting.
We host everything on our own hardware in multiple datacenters. Then we use AD sync with Microsoft Entra ID mainly for Office 365 SSO, but some domains have as many as a dozen other cloud services all configured with SSO via Entra.
Salesforce and other CRMs are the main examples. People can login to their RDS server and use the same credentials to login to their Office 365 and Salesforce or other CRM accounts.
End users often like that. Personally I think password managers are better than SSO, with one point of failure and Microsoft being relied on for everything. But end users prefer having only one login for everything. And sadly that tends to be more secure, because end users will rarely use password managers properly.
End users often like that. Personally I think password managers are better than SSO, with one point of failure and Microsoft being relied on for everything. But end users prefer having only one login for everything. And sadly that tends to be more secure, because end users will rarely use password managers properly.
Our local domains are synced with Entra, so domain logins, RDS logins, 365 logins and CRM tools like Salesforces are all SSO.
Sadly end users do like having just one username, password and 2FA method for everything. It means they only need to remember one password and given it's (in my experience at least) a losing battle to get end users to ever use password managers and secure passwords, it ultimately does improve security.
Issues with users forgetting passwords, losing their 2FA method, or using SMS 2FA and then getting a new number and so on are all almost gone when using Entra.
Issues with users forgetting passwords, losing their 2FA method, or using SMS 2FA and then getting a new number and so on are all almost gone when using Entra.
Do you think Microsoft Entra ID delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Microsoft Entra ID's feature set?
Yes
Did Microsoft Entra ID live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Microsoft Entra ID go as expected?
No
Would you buy Microsoft Entra ID again?
Yes
Comments
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