Make URLs show the same content to different parties

Question

A deeply frustrating feature of a lot of Microsoft UIs is that URLs are not universal. I have come across multiple instances of my giving or receiving a link, then having to get on a call with the other party to hash out why we're not seeing the same thing, as the actual contents of what one's seeing is influenced by browser state and front-end. I most frequently use and so come across this in Azure Portal and ADO (unable to find a precise tag for that).

I don't think this is a feature we've deliberately designed; the point of a link is to provide a quick, short and easy route to a specific piece of information. Having long URLs that do not guarantee a specific view makes linking people to action pages and referencing code/info in code comments unnecessarily unwieldy.

We should make our URLs actually universal, and ideally with fewer characters for easier and cleaner linking.

Answer 1

They are. You'll need to provide us more concrete examples of what you're talking about here.

Note that Azure DevOps is not supported on this forum so questions related to it need to be posted over on Stack Overflow. But as far as Azure Portal goes you can use a URL to navigate to specific resources. Of course if somebody sends you a link to a private dashboard then that won't work. That is sort of the purpose of dashboards. If you need a "team" dashboard then set up a shared dashboard that everyone has access to.

Answer 2

The most recent example I came across was https://ms.portal.azure.com/#@microsoft.onmicrosoft.com/asset/Microsoft_Azure_KeyVault/Secret/<key_vault_url>/secrets/<secret_name>

Clicking on this link takes you to a read only view of the secret in question.

However, if I navigate to the list of objects in the keyvault then click on the same secret I get an entirely different view with the EXACT same URL:

Answer 3

Any comment on this @Michael Taylor ?