Building the Windows Admin Center ecosystem with partners – SDK preview release

This blog post was authored by Daniel Lee, Senior Program Manager, Windows Server.

It’s been an amazing three weeks since the announcement of Windows Admin Center, the future of Windows Server and Windows management for IT admins. We’re continuing to see tremendous adoption from customers, more than doubling the number of installations to over 55,000 deployments and more than 700,000 connection instances in just three weeks! Windows Admin Center is the fastest growing server management tool in the history of Microsoft and we are humbled by your response. To continue the excitement, today, we’re announcing the public preview release of the Windows Admin Center SDK.

From the very beginning, our vision for Windows Admin Center was to seamlessly integrate with other IT administration products and solutions, and to provide a platform for partners and developers to build upon and leverage capabilities within Windows Admin Center. Extensibility is a fundamental part of the platform and each solution and tool within Windows Admin Center was built as an extension. We are now inviting partners and developers to build extensions, add value to your product and solutions, and deliver delightful experiences to your customers.

Extension developer experience for Windows Admin Center

Here’s the value you can bring to your product and customers by developing extensions for Windows Admin Center:

• Integrate with Windows Admin Center tools: Integrate your products and services with server and cluster management tools in Windows Admin Center and deliver unified and seamless, end-to-end monitoring, management, and troubleshooting experiences to your customers.
• Leverage platform security, identity, and management capabilities: Enable Azure Active Directory (AAD) support, multi-factor authentication, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), logging, and auditing for your product and services by leveraging Windows Admin Center platform capabilities to meet the complex requirements of today’s IT organizations.
• Develop using the latest web technologies: Quickly build stunning user experiences using modern web technologies including HTML5, CSS, Angular, TypeScript and jQuery, and rich, powerful UI controls included in the Windows Admin Center SDK.
• Extend product outreach: Become a part of the new Windows Admin Center ecosystem with outreach to our quickly growing customer base and leverage the Windows Server 2019 launch momentum later this year.

Partner spotlight

We’ve worked closely with several partners on developing Windows Admin Center extensions in preparation for the public SDK release. See the amazing value our partners have started to bring to the Windows Admin Center ecosystem and try these extensions out today:

DataON

DataON MUST is a browser-based solution for monitoring and managing DataON hyper-converged infrastructure running Windows Server. The DataON MUST extension provides unique value to customers such as historical data reporting, disk mapping, system alerts, and call home service, complementing the Windows Admin Center server and hyper-converged infrastructure management capabilities, through a seamless, unified experience.

Fujitsu

Fujitsu’s ServerView Health and RAID Health extensions for Windows Admin Center provide in-depth monitoring and management of critical hardware components such as processors, memory, power and storage subsystems for Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers. By utilizing the Windows Admin Center UX design patterns and UI controls, Fujitsu has brought us a huge step towards our vision of end-to-end insight into server roles and services, to operating system, and to hardware management through the Windows Admin Center platform.

Squared Up

Squared Up provides a best-in-class monitoring experience based on System Center Operations Manager and integrating with Azure Log Analytics, Application Insights, and other monitoring solutions. The Squared Up extension brings historical performance data and live application topologies and dependencies into the context of server and cluster management that Windows Admin Center provides, and early customers have acclaimed the value of bringing immense data from many disparate sources into a single experience.

Download and start using extensions from the Windows Admin Center feed

Windows Admin Center extensions are available on the extension feed for download today. In addition to partner extensions, the Storage Migration Service extension for Windows Server 2019 is available through the feed as a preview release as well. We’ll be releasing new tools in preview through the feed for early feedback.

Start developing with the Windows Admin Center SDK

The Windows Admin Center SDK (Preview) is available on GitHub, including step-by-step instructions for building your first “Hello World” extension, sample code for different types of extensions, examples for dozens of UI controls, and UI styles to start building extensions today! The SDK documentation includes an introduction to extension development, guides to various development topics, and instructions for publishing your extension to the feed.

We’ll also be at the Microsoft Build conference in Seattle next week, so join us for our theater session on May 9, 2018 at 4:30-4:50 PM (THR2016) or stop by our booth to talk with the developers on our team.

Send us feedback!

We see tremendous potential in working with our partners and building amazing experiences for our customers together and this is just the beginning of the journey. Your feedback is important for prioritizing our next set of improvements for the SDK – please send us feedback on the SDK through GitHub and continue sending us feedback on the product through UserVoice.