LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure Portal – Getting Started

This document describes the capabilities of LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure Portal, a one-stop-shop for creating and managing sites to keep your teams productive. 

Creating an Organization 

When entering the portal for the first time, you will be prompted to enter the name for your Organization in LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure, along with your preference for receiving “How To” and marketing emails from LiveTiles. 

Each organization manages a collection of Sites, individual instances of LiveTiles, and a list of administrator users who can configure sites for the organization. Once you’ve selected name, you can hit “Lets’ Go” to move on to configuration. 

Portal 

When you first see the portal, you will be starting with an empty organization. You will not have any sites and you will be the only administrator. Before you get started creating sites, it’s best to have a plan about the names, identifiers, and teams that will be using the sites. This site architecture and approach will ensure you get the most out of LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure. 

For a new organization looking at the portal for the first time, it will look something like this: 

Let’s breakdown the interface into components to take a closer look. 

Header 

The header of the interface contains the name of the organization, plus three buttons: 

The buttons are as follows: 

• Create New Site – Clicking this button will bring up the “Create New Site” dialog which starts the process for spinning up a new LiveTiles site. 
• Help – This contains helpful links for understanding the features of the portal, plus a handy link for reaching out to LiveTiles Support to get even more help. 
• User – This link enables access to the logout action which takes you out of the portal. 

Sites, Admins, and Settings 

The next layer of the interface is a trio of tabs, each taking you to the core functionality of the portal: 

The tabs are as follows: 

• Sites – The list of sites in your organization, with access to configuring the domains connected to that site 
• Admins – The list of administrator users for your organization with the ability to invite more or remove users. 
• Settings – The list of properties that can be changed in your organization. As of the writing of this guide, the only option is to change the “Name” of your organization. 

Sites 

The sites list provides an interface to create and configure new sites in LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure. When your organization is first created, this list will be empty and appear like this: 

The friendly green “Get Started” button, the “New” button in the top-left of the list, and the “New Site” button in the top-right of the header all do the same thing: bring up the “Create New Site” dialog to get you started with making new workspaces for team collaboration. 

Create New Site 

To get started making a new site, you use the “Create New Site” dialog, which looks like this: 

It has two fields: 

• Region – A dropdown offering the location for this site. Currently, you can choose West US, Hong Kong, Australia Southeast, and Western Europe. These maps to Microsoft Azure regions. 
• Tenant ID – The alphanumeric identified for this tenant. It will appears in the URL for your site. 

Neither of these fields can be changed after you create the site, so be very sure! After you click “Create” the tenant setup process will begin, during which resources will be allocated for your tenant. This process takes about 60 seconds. Once it’s completed, you are ready to go to your site and start inviting users to share in the high-speed collaboration of LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure. 

Site Details 

When you have some sites live in your organization, the Sites list will look something like this: 

This provides you “at a glance” information for the site, plus the top-right search bar’s ability to find a site. To go to a site, to start building content or managing the audience for that site, you can click the link in the right-most column labeled “Domain”. To go to a sites’ properties, you can click on the row and it will open the site details. 

This provides the following functionality: 

• Site Name – This not only displays the site name, but also allows your to change it. This is a display name only and does NOT change the site URL. 
• Domain – This is a list of all domains for the site, including the “built-in” domain from LiveTiles, plus any custom domains you have requested 
• Request Custom Domain – This simply button enables you to start a request with LiveTiles Support to have a new custom domain setup [Hyperlink to Custom Domain article]. 
• Add Directory Service – These are additional actions that set up new authentication methods for your site. As of the writing of this article, the only service supported is Okta. For more information, read the section “Set Up Okta”. 

Set Up Okta 

When clicking the “Set Up Okta” button, that will bring up a dialog designed to collect all of the key information for Okta security integration with your site. 

The dialog has the following fields, each of them based on a field in Okta used to configure a new app in Okta. For more information on configuring Okta, read this guide from Okta on how to create a web application. 

• Custom Domain – The requested custom domain for this integration. All Okta-enabled sites require a custom domain which must be available for DNS and SSL configuration either by your organization or LiveTiles. For more information on Custom Domains, read this article [hyperlink to custom domain article]. 

• Login Redirect Url – This is automatically generated based on your Custom Domain. This should be copied into Okta to represent the location where you LiveTiles site receives its callback from the Okta API. 
• Okta Org Url – This is tied to your Okta tenant and should be copied from Okta into this field. 
• Client ID – This is the identifier for your application and should be copied from from “Client Credentials” box in Okta relevant to the new web application (see “Okta Client Credentials” below). 
• Client Secret – This is the secret key for your app which indicates the app is a trusted resource in regards to Okta’s API. This should be copied from the “Client Credentials” box in Okta. 

Once you click “Set Up Okta”, a message will be sent to LiveTiles Support to initiate setting up your Custom Domain. This process may require some back-and-forth communication with LiveTiles. Once your Okta configuration has been confirmed, plus DNS and SSL consideration has been made for the custom domain, you can start inviting users into your site and they will be able to authenticate with Okta. 

Okta User Interface 

Here are some example screenshots on how to find the values for your new Okta app in the Okta UI. These are accurate as of March 2020. 

First, the Okta Org Url can be found in the Okta Dashboard’s right-right corner: 

To find the Redirect URLs, go to the Okta application’s “General” tab and look for the section labeled “Login”. This screen is displaying the configuration for a site that would have the custom domain “local.cloud”: 

Finally, the Client ID and Client Secret are below the “Login” section in the card labeled “Client Credentials”: 

Admins 

The second tab in the portal, Admins, provides a list of administrator users in your organization: 

Accounts on this list are allowed to create and configure sites, add or remove admins, and change the settings in your organization. You can also search the list of admins using the search box on the top-right. 

You can invite a new administrator by click “Add” in the top-left. This will bring up the following dialog: 

Entering an email and hitting “Add” will sent an invite message to that address, encouraging them to login. When the user logs into the system for the first time, their name will update in the portal and they will be able to configure your organization and sites. 

Settings 

The Settings tab provides a way to configure the properties of your organization: 

Right now, the only editable field is the display name of the organization – as in the value appearing the top header when users enter the portal. To change it, simply click the pencil icon on the right, enter a new value, and commit it using the checkbox icon. Discard changes using the red “X” icon. 

Conclusion 

The LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure Portal is a one-stop-shop for managing your organization and sites. Its simple interface opens up a world of possibility for teams in your company. We look forward to seeing the collaboration, communication, and creativity that LiveTiles will unlock for you. If you have any additional question or need additional help with the portal, please message mailto:Support@LiveTiles.Nyc.