Portals for Microsoft 365 (Version 2.00)

It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since I released a little tool called Portals. Its original purpose was simple: work around the guest‑account limitations in Microsoft Teams by letting you open multiple Teams windows for the same user under different contexts. That way, you could easily keep all your guest tenants visible at once.

What surprised me was how useful the launcher mechanism itself was for my workflow. Opening different Teams windows on demand turned out to be a genuinely efficient workflow. So I expanded the idea. Portals grew into a way to sign into a range of Microsoft portals under different authentication contexts, giving you a fast, reliable, multi‑tenant launcher that could open multiple portals across multiple tenants with a single click.

Six years later, though, Portals was showing its age. I originally built it when Electron was still young, using a JavaScript framework that has long since passed its prime. Supporting it had become increasingly difficult. It was time…

<START MONTAGE - Audio Plays: NEON MEDUSA by THE MIDNIGHT>

• A man cracks his knuckles as he sits down at the keyboard.
• A clock spins in time‑lapse as hours blur into days, then into weeks.
• Sweat rolls down his brow as he continues to type deep into the night.
• He drinks half a can of caffeinated beverage, crushes it, and throws it at the wall.
• He types "npm run start" into the terminal. An error message appears. He looks upward and screams into the endless void.
• The clock spins faster, then falls off the wall.
• As he sleeps at the desk, a GitHub upload bar inches forward. It finally completes.
• The broken man lifts his head. His fingers, raw and bloodied from typing, grip the mouse. He clicks the Publish Release button.

<END MONTAGE>

Portals 2.00 is here. 

DOWNLOAD NOW

UI Update

Rewritten from the ground up in React. All Portals have been tested, pruned, updated to new URLs, and refreshed with new icons. The Launcher and Browser windows now support both Dark and Light mode.

Note: If you're upgrading you may notice that some of the old portals are now gone (been retired) or have had a name change (blame Microsoft marketing). If a portal was renamed in this update, simply click Edit at the top of the launcher window, then select Add Portal on the account to add the newly named version.

Tabbed Mode

Portals for each account open in the same window with tabs!

Tabbed mode setting in Global Preferences:

Updated Teams Notifications

The Teams notifications have been completely rebuilt to support the new Teams implementation. Notifications now support muting for a duration you choose in Global Preferences.

The setting in Global Preference:

During a Mute period, you can unmute with the following setting:

Passkey Support

Support for Passkeys and passkey‑dialog muting (because when you’re not using passkeys, those Windows prompts get annoying fast).

Global Preference Setting to disable passkeys:

Per account setting to disable passkeys:

Here's the release notes:

Portals Version 2.00

Features / Changes:

- Updated Electron 40.2.1

- Updated Chromium 144.0.7559.111

- Entire app rebuilt from the ground-up using React.

- Tabbed Mode - Allow you to open windows from the same account in tabs in the same window (Default behaviour for 2.00).

- Browser window UI improvements.

- Now supports separate Browser Window Dark/Light mode and Launcher window Dark/Light mode.

- Now supports passkey auth - This is a Windows level popup that gets spawned by the Microsoft Login window. If you are not using Passkey you can disable this popup (because it can be annoying) in either the Global Preferences or at an account level in Account Preferences.

- Updated all portal URLs.

- Updated all portal icons.

- Added toast notification muting - Click the notification mute button on the toast and it will mute toasts for the time selected in Global Preferences. Toasts can be turned back on in the Global Preference if you want them re-enabled prior to the mute timeout ending.

- Updated the look of toast notifications.

- Fixed calling pops and chat toasts to work with New Teams.

- Improved notification toasts to be shown quicker.

- Removed custom chat notification sounds. The Teams notification sound is now used.

- Notification toasts now display for as long as they are displayed within Teams.

- Major portal updates:

Portal Added:

Places - https://places.cloud.microsoft/places/admin/space-management

Viva Learning - https://learning.cloud.microsoft/

Viva Insights - https://analysis.insights.cloud.microsoft/

Viva Pulse - https://pulse.cloud.microsoft/

Viva Suite - https://viva.cloud.microsoft/

Lists - https://www.office.com/launch/lists

Pages - https://make.powerpages.microsoft.com/

Bookings - https://outlook.office.com/bookings/

Portals Changed:

- yammer > engage

- my analytics > insights

- endpoint manager > intune

- cloud app security > defender

- managed rooms > teams rooms pro

- security > defender

Portals Retired:

- exchange old - Retired

- yammer admin - Is now Viva Engage

- kaizala - Retired

- project - Is now planner

- defender endpoint - defender

- defender identity - defender

- compliance - is now purview

Note 1: Some of these changes will require you to re‑add certain portals to your accounts after migration due to name changes.

Note 2: The passcode setting will be disabled during the migration to version 2.00. Simply turn it back on and set your passcode again to re‑enable it.

The Wrap Up

For everyone who’s stuck with Portals over the years - cheers! And for those discovering it for the first time, enjoy. It’s been a long road

Read more →