Configure Email Discovery to subscribe to your Windows Virtual Desktop feed
One of my customers saw this dialog box while doing user assignments to application groups in their Azure Portal for Windows Virtual Desktop.
Setup email discovery to help your users discover their resources using an email address instead of the deployment URL
To connect to Windows Virtual Desktop, there are a couple of ways using different form factors/operating systems:
If you are using the Windows Desktop Client and Web Client, it is relatively easy as user will just need to sign in with their user account and their associated workspace(s) will be populated.
For the rest of the clients, users will need to subscribe to the WVD Feed URL as the main approach to get their workspaces. The current WVD Feed URL for Spring Release is https://rdweb.wvd.microsoft.com/api/arm/feeddiscovery.
Users will have the tenancies to make mistakes when typing — either because of a single missing character in the feed URL or because they lost the email with the URL. (P.S. the other way is to ask users to COPY AND PASTE 😛)
To reduce the error and frustration, setting up email discovery will make it easier for your users to use their email addresses instead.
Environment
For this demo, I will be using my own WVD tenant which I have set up for both Fall and Spring releases as part of my daily work. To access, I will be using the Remote Desktop Mobile on iOS.
When I try to add a new workspace using my email address, it will prompt an message that there is no workspace associated with this email address.
Setup Email Discovery
You can following the steps from this documentation — Set up email discovery to subscribe to your RDS feed.
For this demo tenant, I do not have a custom domain. I will be adding the custom TXT records in Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
Below are the properties which I added:
- Host: _msradc
- Text: https://rdweb.wvd.microsoft.com/api/arm/feeddiscovery (Always validate and check the URL)
- TTL: 1/2 Hour (Unable to set 300 seconds as it was a drop down option)
Testing the email discovery
Once completed, you may return to the mobile app and enter your email address. You should be able to see this view if everything is done correctly.
Just follow the rest of the steps, sign in and the associated workspace will be populated in the mobile app.
If you have additional workspaces associated to your email address, you can download it to the app as well.
Here is a side-by-side comparison on the before and after setting email discovery for your users.
Below is a short video on the experience using email discovery to access to your associated workspaces.
Hope you have fun setting up your own Windows Virtual Desktop! We have also written some other related articles which you may find it useful:
- Experience with WVD and Packer — co-written with Steve Chow and David Choo
- Experience of Creating A Full WVD Golden Image — written by Steve Chow
- Create the latest WVD with new capabilities — written by Steve Chow
The opinions and views expressed here are those of my own and do not necessarily state or reflect those of Microsoft Singapore or Microsoft Corporation.
