One Shining Moment: Previewing Okta's New User Experience Through Bracketology

Cue The Killers. The most wonderful time of the year is upon us. We have graduates of the BYU Cougars, Stanford Cardinal, Michigan Wolverines, Colorado Buffalos and UCLA Bruins all rooting for their teams to pull major upsets and go dancing in Arlington in early April. Heck, even Todd’s alma mater – the Cal Poly Mustangs – clinched its first berth in school history. The stage is set for what many are anticipating to be the most unpredictable tourney in recent memory.

And what better way to celebrate than to combine March Madness with our day-to-day to not only make those brackets and live streams a wee bit easier to access, but also showcase some of the cool features our customers can expect over the next few months? We’re sports fans, but don’t forget, we’re also enterprise geeks.

We’ve added a number of the must-have ‘bracketology’ apps – CBS, Yahoo, and NBC – to the Okta Application Network just in time for the tournament. No need to dig through old emails to find passwords you only use once a year or reset them incessantly for the next few weeks. Breathe a sigh of relief because Okta can now be your tournament headquarters. Simply search for any of these apps today – and add them to your catalog instantly.

That’s just the beginning. To give our customers a taste of what’s coming, we’ve also prepared a sneak peek at our new end-user experience. As Todd has told both TechCrunch and Recode recently, the user experience in the enterprise is essential to any modern technology project today. We take that to heart, and this is one of many steps we're taking this year to ensure that Okta continues to be a platform that delivers simple and powerful experiences for both IT leaders and end users.

One of the most exciting new features in our UX is the ‘tabs’ feature, which lets people create custom tabs by which to categorize and access their applications. These tabs can effectively serve as dashboards (I like to call them ‘app boards’) for different uses. Whether it’s a tab with apps they use everyday, a specific initiative, or organized simply by feature set (collaboration, personal, HR, etc.), users can drag and drop apps from the Okta Application Network to accommodate how they want to work. Or, in the case of our March Madness fanatics, how they want to play. As you'll see in our UX preview video, you'll be able to even create an app board for March Madness, containing instant access to your many brackets (let's face it - nobody has just one), and any other apps you might use to optimize your March Madness experience.

If you're an Okta customer, and you want to get your hands on this new UX right away, please let us know by emailing [email protected], and become a part of our limited beta program. Happy March Madness!