Microsoft shows it gets the cloud by integrating products and focusing on mobile

Microsoft is releasing a preview of a new sign-on experience that better suits mobile devices and eliminates the need to enter login information more than once across Windows Azure, Office 365, Windows email and other company products.

The development shows Microsoft has a better sense now of how enterprises actually use the cloud (on any available device be it a phone or a laptop) and brings the company closer to Google’s unified login approach, which allows customers to sign in once across all of the Google products in one go.

The new sign-on presentation features responsive design to best match screen size. If a user pulls up the sign-on screen for Office 365, though, illustrations are excluded, increasing speed and cutting down on bandwidth. Users can elect to stay signed in until they sign out with the new presentation, too.

The new style will become Microsoft’s default in the winter. The software giant is slowly adapting from its years of selling licensed software for PCs to the current reality of web services accessed from a variety of devices.

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