Last week, Microsoft dropped a bombshell with the release of Slimcore for Teams, specifically designed for VDI environments. Let’s unpack what this means for us and how it can supercharge our virtual desktops.
What is Slimcore?
Slimcore is the new media engine for Teams, tailored for VDI setups like Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. It’s packed with improvements that make Teams more efficient and user-friendly in virtual environments. No longer is the Teams client for VDI a long lost cousin of Teams, now we will see feature parity!
Key Features and Benefits
So what are the key features and benefits with moving to Slimcore from WebRTC?
Enhanced Performance: Slimcore cuts down on resource consumption, leading to faster call setup times and smoother performance. This is a game-changer for those of us juggling multiple virtual desktops.
High-Fidelity Media: Enjoy top-notch audio and 1080p video at up to 30fps. This ensures our meetings and presentations are crystal clear, even in a virtual setup.
Advanced Meeting Capabilities: Features like gallery view, custom backgrounds, and presenter mode are now available, making our virtual meetings more interactive and engaging.
Auto-Updates: The decoupled architecture allows for quicker feature rollouts without needing to overhaul the entire VDI infrastructure. Staying current with the latest features has never been easier.
Installing Slimcore on Windows 365 Clients
Prerequisites: Make sure you have the latest version of Microsoft Teams (version 24193.1805.3040.8975 or higher) and the Remote Desktop client (version 1.2.5405.0 or higher) or the new Windows app (version 1.3.252 or higher).
Install the Plugin: The plugin (MsTeamsPluginAvd.dll) is bundled with both the Remote Desktop client and the new Windows app. It will automatically download and manage Slimcore. No admin rights or reboots are required.
Verify Installation: After installation, the plugin will silently provision and register Slimcore for the user. You can verify this by check in the Teams client on the Cloud PC that the Slimcore client is being used by going to Settings – About Teams. Look for the text “AVD Slimcore Media Optimized”.
User Experience Improvements
One of the standout aspects of Slimcore is how it aligns the Teams experience between physical and virtual desktops. This consistency is crucial for user satisfaction and productivity. This gives the user a familiar experiance with the features they expect to find in Teams!
Conclusion
Slimcore is a significant step forward for Teams in VDI environments. It brings enhanced performance, high-fidelity media, and advanced meeting capabilities, all while simplifying updates and maintenance. If you haven’t tried it yet, now is the perfect time to explore what Slimcore can do for your virtual desktop setup.
I started a blogpost something like this about 4 years ago:
“I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time, probably several years to be honest. What got me to get this done is something Microsoft released, the Windows 10 in cloud configuration, which is a configuration guide for how to move to cloud managed Windows 10 devices.
This is great!
This shows that managing Windows 10 purely from Microsoft Intune is not rocket science and it will make it easier for smaller companies especially to get going.
BUT this is also showing what I’ve been expecting for a couple of years. “
Let’s stop the tape right here. I’ve added to this post once back in 2022 but never finished it. And to be honest, this has been on my mind since 2016. I recall that this was planted in my head in a conference room at the Microsoft Madrid office at a meeting with my team back in the days.
This post was initiated long before the release of Windows 11, and before the release of Windows 365. AI was still something that was being explored but not a massive thing, we were more focusing on machine learning than AI. It feels like ages ago, but it still makes sense to talk about this given what is currently happening with Cloud PCs, AI, and continuous innovation in Windows 11.
This is probably to date the blogpost that has taken the longest to write, but it’s starting to make sense now.
The change of device management
When we talk about device management, and especially Windows, things tend to get technical and hard quite fast. Especially if we throw some on-premises things into the mix and talk about creating custom boot images (which is an artform in itself).
Now we are in the age of AI and Copilots. Copilots showing up everywhere for everything. We have currently seen what is called the Microsoft Security Copilot where security admins can query the Copilot to find issues and even troubleshot device configurations. This is only the beginning of the AI transformation we are on. The Security Copilot also connects into Microsoft Intune, becoming Copilot in Intune.
Looking at Microsoft Intune and how simple it is to get started with a surprisingly good baseline and basic device management, this is a fitting example of how this whole segment has evolved into something which does not need to be that complex anymore with servers, distribution points, image creation, OSD, GPOs. Using Intune, you can get a long way with the guided scenarios or the security baseline which are already existing in Intune today. You can even get suggestions on what to set using the Settings Insight feature in Intune which will give you recommendations on how to configure your security baseline using machine learning. And that is without any Copilots.
AI will help us
What has gotten me to finish this blogpost is the Copilot and Intune story that Microsoft is now telling, I attended WP Ninja Summit 2024 in Lucerne where Copilot was mentioned in a lot of sessions and showed real world value. Copilot can find issues with devices, or policies, which would take admins hours, or even days to find. If you get that in about a minute or two, that is an huge increase in productivity. Copilot is not yet in the state that it will suggest that “you should configure your setup like this”, it’s still learning Intune. But just putting the tools in the hands of admins simplifies their work… Wow.
But there is also a conflict of interest here. If I can use Copilot to find that error in a few minutes… Why do I need to pay expensive consultants to do the work for me? Well, I think we who live and breath device management needs to raise our line of sight a little and find what the next big thing is and how we can stay relevant. This will be challenge for many, but this change will also take several years to complete.
I would assume that this is just the start of a pretty epic journey in device management, making life easier and probably quite drastically changing how we work with device management. Microsoft has a lot of data of what “a good device management configuration” should look like. Even if most organisations think they are unique and have unique needs, most organisations share the same baseline needs but of course with their unique touch on-top of things. This is where the focus should be, not the baselines where we tend to spend way to much time on today.
What about Windows?
By listening to a lot of sessions around Windows 365 and looking at how Microsoft is positioning this as the future of Windows, I think we will see a shift in a few years. Not in the next one or two years, but looking at Windows 365 Boot, the new Windows 365 experience being released for Motorola Think Phone, and the general focus on sustainability I think we will see both a technical and culture shift in what a computer is in the next couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, we will still have some kind of device but it will probably be different to what we are used to today.
Just imagine that you suddenly could access your computer from any device you have, only needing one device to both get a mobile och desktop experience depending on your context. If you are like me, someone who work a lot from places where you don’t have a external monitors, well maybe your device will not be a smartphone only. Or maybe you even have two devices but your “laptop” is something with focus on giving you optimal battery life and great longevity.
One thing that sticks in my head right now though is “we are moving Windows to he cloud” and not just management with Windows 365. Windows as an operating system will still be the foundation of a lot of business work and applications, but how we consume it is where the difference will lie.
My predictions
So my big two predictions about where this whole area is heading, even if we are a few years out:
Intune management will drastically change once Copilot for Intune is more widely used, making device management in general a whole lot easier
Windows will be consumed for “a device” and that device might not have Windows installed on it. We will come back to the world of thin clients, but more optimized for the connected world.
Of course, several years of experience will still be relevant, but doing the clicking and selecting what exact setting to accomplish the wanted state, that will not be a hard part.
As I hope ALL of you know, Windows 10 is reaching End of Service (EOS) on the 14th of October 2025. If you haven’t marked your calendars already, do so now! This date is even more important if you haven’t made the move over to Windows 11 yet. This does not affect the Windows 10 LTSC currently in support.
The path to reaching Windows 11 can vary, and it’s hard to say that “this is how you should do it”. Some decide to combine this with their cloud journey, some simply just upgrades, and some haven’t really thought about it yet. This blogpost is aimed to inspire those of you who haven’t made the move yet for different reasons. And those of you who help others and need inspiration. So, less focus on tech and more focus on the reasoning to make the move.
Why should you move to Windows 11?
To be honest, the reason to move to Windows 11 is simple. Windows 10 will no longer receive updates unless you decide to pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU). This will be a fairly expensive way to tackle staying up to date. Microsoft announced back in April that the first year will cost $61 per device the first year. Given that the Windows 11 upgrade is free, there are few reasons to not move. We also see over 99% application compability between Windows 10 and Windows 11. Looking at customers I’ve helped and talked about this with, the issue is rarely the applications anymore.
If we disregard from that Windows 11 brings a whole lot of new security related features to the OS. But it also brings more simplicity to the end user. One thing I hear often is that “the start menu is in the middle, our users will never learn this”. It takes about a day to get used to it, so the problem is not really there. This has so far not been an issue with the customers I’ve helped. Howeber, IT has often thought this would be the number one support issue.
What does Windows 11 bring to the table?
What Windows 11 brings is, however, innovation. Like it or not, Copilot will be part of our everyday life. In Windows 11, you have it at your fingertips with the native Copilot app. Depending on where you live, the experience will vary. There is a native app, or you will have to get the app from the store. Since AI and Copilot are mentioned in almost every context and situation, giving your end users access to a powerful AI in Windows is a huge improvement.
What is important with Windows 11 upgrades is communication to end-users so they know whats going on. Un-announced upgrades are rarley a good idea since it can potentially mess with people flows initially, or unexpected reboots. Teaching your users to make use of all the new and improved features of Windows 11. This is a great way to give the feeling that you from IT are proactive and offering them the latest and greatest.
The downside of moving to Windows 11
To be fair, downside is the wrong word. There is one potential problem with moving to Windows 11, which is that older hardware is not supported. We are talking about things released prior to 2017, creating a huge amount of e-waste. For many companies, this would not be a problem given that you have proper lifecycle management of your devices. But it creates a huge amount of devices which will not be feasable to use any more.
However, there are some ways you can still make use of them. Being a Microsoft advocate, my favourite is running Windows 365 on them. If you run a Cloud PC from a Windows 10 machine, the ESU will be free of charge and you can keep using that machine going forward, but that means using it to access a Cloud PC which is running Windows 11. You can ofcourse also convert them to thin clients using something like IGEL and have their OS accessing the Cloud PC.
But going back to the topic of e-waste. This will be a huge challange, not only from a corporate and logistic perspecitve. But from en environmental perspective. There will be A LOT of devices which needs to be recylced, and we must really hope that they will be recycled and not just thrown away or shreded.
Get to Windows 11 fast
So what is the fastest path to Windows 11? A lot of times when we talk about moving to Windows 11, we talk about going cloud native.
I’m all for going cloud native and I would recomend it to everyone. But going cloud native if you are on-premises or hybrid today is timeconsuming, and not really needed.
If you listen carefully how Microsoft talked about the journey, it’s rarely stated that you should re-install every device as cloud native. What they are talking about is moving to Intune, and that is a different thing since you can be Intune only but still being hybrid.
So for most organisations, going hybrid for all exisiting devices is the fastest path to Intune only. But remeber that ALL new devices should be cloud native (since you wont really gain anything from new hybrid devices).
But looping back to Windows 11 and getting there fast.
Windows 10 have had a steady release cadence, even if it has shifted a bit over the years. You have moved from Windows 10 20h2, to Windows 10 21h2, to Windows 10 22h2 using either Windows Update or Configuration Manager. When looking to move to Windows 11, you can view this as “yet another update” and deploy it as such.
You hopefully already have a working process for this in place, and if you are doing custom images this would apply to you imaging lifecycling as well.
Since we have about a year left, this would be the fastest way to get there and move to Intune after that.
Take aways
The main take away from this is that dont make the Windows 11 journey harder than it has to be. Windows 11 is not that scary and it’s a great operating system regardless of what different internet forums says. From a business perspective, this shouldn’t be a discussion. Just a go do!
We never discuss or get stuck on iOS versions in the same way, not wanting to move to the next version.
A couple of years ago, in the begining of this blog, I wrote about consumerization of corporate IT and it’s still relevant. We as individuals are driving change. We are no longer in a world where IT can say “no, we wont give you the lastest version of this and that” since things will stop working. If you run an unsupported version of Windows you are not only facing potential security threats. You will also see that a lot of your business applications will stop working, since these has adapted to the Windows as a Service concept introduced with Windows 10.
What is the biggest take away from this blog? If you haven’t set the plan to migrate to Windows 11, start now! You have less than a year left.
One thing that many IT administrators tackles every day is the discussion about “my computer feels slow” or “I need a faster computer”. Sometime the feeling of having a slow computer is legit, and sometimes it’s something else.
There are numerous DEX (Digital Employee Experience) tools out there on the market. This can provide you with a great overview of your whole ecosystem, ranging from Teams call quality to desktop experience. However, even if those tools are great, they come with a new set of data to analyze in a new tool. And in bigger organizations, the complicated puzzle of “who owns this and who makes remediations?” arises.
Since I write a lot about Microsoft stuff, we will dive into the IntuneAdvanced Analytics part of the Intune Suite.
Intune Advanced Analytics is a native part of Intune, which gives you more extensive reporting on your Windows devices. I know Windows isn’t 100% of the fleet in modern organizations but we need to start somewhere.
Setting up Intune Advanced Analytics
To start using Intune Advanced Analytics, you will need these three things.
Intune environment
Intune Suite licenses or Intune Advanced Analytics stand-alone license (remember, this is user based)
Configuring Endpoint analytics in Intune
I won’t go through how to obtain license, since this will vary from case to case depending on your setup.
Configuring Endpoint Analytics
The first thing you need to do is to configure Endpoint Analytics to receive data from your devices. Since I’m all in the cloud, we will look at how you do this for Intune managed devices. To do this, you need to have the Intune Service Administrator role, also known as Intune Administrator.
Head over to the Endpoint Analytics blade in Intune (you can find it under Reports or at https://aka.ms/endpointanalytics). When in there, select the Settings blade.
You can see that my tenant already uses the Intune data collection policy. This default policy exists in all tenants, but you need to make sure it’s assigned to your devices.
Manually create the policy
If you can’t find the policy in your environment, it’s no big deal. You just need create a new policy based on the template for Windows Health monitoring.
If you are configuring this for the first time, make sure to switch Health monitoring to Enable and set the Scope to Endpoint analytics.
Deploy this policy to your devices using either the built in “All devices” group or use a device group.
When you set this up for the first time, it can take up to 24 hours for the data to populate. If you are looking to use Advanced Analytics, expect up to 48 hours.
Allow access to URLs
The last step to do is to make sure that your devices are allowed to reach the URL needed for Endpoint Analytics. This is important if you have a restrictive firewall or if you use a webfilter/proxy to run all your traffic through.
Now when 24 hours have passed, we should start seeing data being populated. If you have additional people who should not be admins who need to review the data. There are a few different built-in roles you can use, or create a custom role.
These are the different options you have:
Role name
Microsoft Entra role
Intune role
Endpoint analytics permissions
Global Administrator
Yes
Read/write
Intune Service Administrator
Yes
Read/write
School Administrator
Yes
Read/write
Endpoint Security Manager
Yes
Read only
Help Desk Operator
Yes
Read only
Read Only Operator
Yes
Read only
Reports Reader
Yes
Read only
Once we have our roles in order, we can start looking at the data!
Looking at the data
The Endpoint Analytics feature consist of 6 different blades
Startup Performance
Application reliability
Work from anywhere
Resource performance
Remoting connection
These features are available with the regular Intune license. With the Intune Advance Analytics license you will get a few more. And it’s automatically integrated into the Intune administrator experience.
But as I stated in the beginning of the post, let’s talk about reviewing resource performance. With the regular Intune license, you will gain access to resource performance for your Cloud PCs. With this, I get insights which Cloud PCs are meeting my targets and what Cloud PCs I should investigate upgrading to a different SKU. This data can be broken down to a device or model. This gives me great data about my environment on CPU and RAM spikes when they are being used.
All devices get a score based on their performance, and you can configure what your baseline is in the Endpoint Analytics settings.
You can break the numbers down based on model or individual device performance to get a better understanding.
With the 2408 Intune Service update, this was also made available for physical devices if you have the Intune Advance Analytics license enabled. This will provide me with insights on how my physical devices are performing when it comes to RAM and CPU. I can also learn if they have continuous spikes indicating that they need an upgrade.
If we stand in the “Device performance” tab, we can see all Cloud PCs and physical PCs gathered in the same place. You can also compare Cloud PC and physical PC performance.
Looking at specific devices
If we click on the name of a device, you will be redirected to the blade “User experience” on the device itself. You can also find it if you search for a device in the device list and click in to view that device.
From here, you can see a lot of data about the device around its performance.
As you can see, my Surface Laptop Go 3 has had a few minor spikes in RAM the last 14 days but nothing major.
And if we look at the overall score, it’s pretty okay.
Device timeline
There is one more really nice feature with the Intune Advanced Analytics we can see, and that is a Device Timeline (last tab on the top).
In here, we can see historical data on events that has happened on the device which impact the user experience. As you can see on this device, I’m having a few issues with applications.
And if we jump back and look at another device, a Cloud PC, we can see the same kind of data.
One interesting thing I found while writing this blog post is that I compared my Surface Laptop Go 3 i5 with 16gb RAM with my 4vCPU/16GB Cloud PC. What I can see was that my Cloud PC scores higher. I would say that I use them in a similar way, the same amount of time. I do know that the Cloud PC has a little bit of a more powerfull CPU (being a cloud PC),
The Cloud PC scores 98 in resource performance.
While my Surface Laptop Go 3 scores 77.
So performance wise, Cloud PCs are doing a lot better. However, the Surface Laptop Go 3 is not a fair comparance being a more “low tier” PC. However, they are still both performing really good for what I use them for. So this is important to take into considerations when looking at the data.
Take away
Knowing how the performance of the devices in your environment chelan p you figure out when devices needs to be replaces or upgraded. As you already know, backing your decisions using data is key! Intune can provide you with a lot of data on your device without the need to buy a third party tool and deploying/maintaining a client on the device.
However, if we start looking at “real” DEX products, Intune Advanced Analytics does not provide the same level of data. You will also need to combine several parts of Intune to be able to perform e.g. remediations on the things you find. You still need to manually take actions or create remediation scripts on your findings.
But if you are just getting started and need “something”, this will provide you with a great overview of your environment! This will help you make better decisions and help your end-users even better!
I hope you liked this post and that it gave you some insights to what you can do with Intune Advanced Analytics!
Like all Swedes, summer means vacation mode for 4-5 weeks and that means not keeping up with what’s happening in the world.
So here is a recap of what’s been happening during the summer months.
MVP renewal
In the begning of July, the MVP renewals where announced and I’m happy to announce that I’ve been renewed as a Windows and Devices MVP for the 3rd time.
Big congratulation to all my fellow MVPs that got renewed for 2024!
Windows 365 updates
July was full of Windows 365 updates, there has been updates for Windows 365 each week since July 1st which is really awesome. A lot of great updates.
Here are some highlights, but if you want to see the full list check it out here.
Cross region disaster recovery
Windows 365 cross region disaster recovery is an optional service for Windows 365 Enterprise which protects the Cloud PCs and data against regional outages. This is a seperatly licensed service which can be purchased as an add-on to your existing service.
Windows 365 Cloud PC gallery images use new Teams VDI
The new Teams for VDIs has been added to the Windows 365 image gallery, containing all the optimizations for Windows 365. All your newly previsioned Cloud PCs will containg the new optimizations.
New GPU offerings for Cloud PCs are now generally available
Microsoft has finally released the new GPU offering! The GPU offerings are suitable for graphical intense workloads requiring a more optimized performance. The offering consists of three different SKUs called Standard, Super and Max with different configurations for different kinds of workloads.
Uni-directional clipboard support is now generally available
The clipboard settings for Windows 365 and AVD has been in preview for a while, but have now been
moved into general availability with some pretty nice added functionallity. You can configure a lot of new different content type, and you can select to allow which direction clipboard should be allowed. This applies to both Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop.
Update for Apple user and device enrollments with Company Portal
Microsoft has updated the registration process for Apples devices using the Intune Company Portal. The main change is that now the Entra ID registration happens after the enrollment, instead of during the enrollment. This applies for both iOS/iPadOs devices and macOS devices.
The change means that if you are using dynamic device Entra ID groups which rely on the device registration, you need to make sure that the users complete the whole process.
New configuration capabilities for Managed Home Screen
If you are using managed home screen for Android, you can now enable the virtual app-switcher button to allow users to switch between apps on a kiosk device.
Copilot in Intune now has the device query feature using Kusto Query Language (KQL) (public preview)
If you are using Copilot in Intune, you can now generate a KQL query using Copilot while asking in natural language. Great way to learn KQL or get inspiration for your querys!
New operatingSystemVersion filter property with new comparison operators (preview)
There is a new filter property for operatingSystemVersion, which is available in a public preview.
This filter allows you to use operators like GreaterThan, GreaterThanOrEquals, LessThan and LessThanOrEquals to your oprating system version and is available for Android, iOS/iPadOS, macOS and Windows!
Consolidation of Intune profiles for identity protection and account protection
Microsoft has done some cleaning up around identity and account protection policies and added them all into a single profile called Account protection which can be found in the account protection policy node of endpoint security. This is the only template which will be available going forward for identity and account protection. The new profile also includes Windows Hello for Business and Windows Credential Guard.
Microsoft Intune now supports device management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can enroll and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux devices, and assign standard compliance policies, custom configuration scripts, and compliance scripts.
ACME protocol support for iOS/iPadOS and macOS enrollment
Microsoft has started a phased rollout of the infrastructure change to support the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol. When a new Apple devices enroll, the management profile from Intune receives an ACME certificate instead of a SCEP certificate. Existing OS and hardware eligible devices do not get the ACME certificate unless they re-enroll.
Windows updates
The realse of Windows 11 24h2 is getting closer and closer, and it could be guessed to be released in a September/October time frame looking at past releases.
One thing that is also important to highlight is that we are getting closer and closer to the Windows 10 EOS, which means that we really need to focus on getting those devices migrated or removed.
Something I know a lot of Microsoft Intune admins have been frustrated about for a while, especially if you come from the GPO world, is making sure that the settings you applied are what you think they are on the device. I mean, things happen. Users can be local admins and change stuff, a support person could have changed something locally, or stuff just won’t work.
As we all know, an up and running Intune Windows device will check in with Intune every 8 hours to see if the settings are still correct. 8 hours is quite a long time if you have a faulty configuration, and not all users know that they can manually synchronize their device with Intune (or an admin can do so).
This is where the newly introduced Config Refresh enters the stage!
What is Config Refresh?
Config Refresh is a new setting in Windows 11 (23h2 or 22h2 with the 2024 June update) which lets you define the interval that the Windows device should refresh the configuration based on what is defined in Intune. In the GPO world, this happens automatically every 90 minutes, and in the Intune world this is 8 hours! But with Config Refresh we can squeeze this down as short as 30 minutes or push it all the way up to 24 hours (why someone would do that, I don’t know but I bet there are those scenarios).
But this isn’t just changing the default 8 hour intervall, this actually brings some new stuff to the table:
A reset operation to reset any settings you manage which use the Policy CSP
Configuration options to allow reset of managed settings to take place as frequently as every 30 minutes
Offline functionality, not requiring connectivity to an MDM server
Ability to pause Config Refresh for troubleshooting purposes with automatic resume after 24 hours
This means that we get a bunch of new features in the MDM world which we have not had before!
How do I configure it?
But how do I configure this in my environment? The Config Refresh policy is set in the settings catalog, so let’s jump straight into Devices – Windows – Configuration and add a new Settings Catalog policy.
As usual, give your policy a name which makes sense to you in your environment and click next. I’m going for “Win – Config Refresh” in this example.
Now let’s search for “Config Refresh” and add both the settings to our policy.
Let’s go for a 30-minute interval in this example but set what makes sense to your environment (default value is 90 minutes). Also, make sure to enable the “Config Refresh” setting before clicking on next.
If you are using scope tags, you can add that in the next step otherwise move on to assignment. Since this is a device scope setting, let’s target the device for this one so we can make sure that all our devices get this setting regardless of who signs in. If you want to filter our specific devices, add that as well here.
On the last step, review your settings before clicking on “Create“.
This will configure your devices to refresh their policies every 30 minutes!
Bonus:
If you for some reason want to prevent a device from doing a Config Refresh, you can find the device and press those three dots on the right side of the ribbon. You will then find “Pause config refresh”.
You can then pause the refresh for up to 24 hours.
Key take away
Using the Config Refresh we can make sure that our device has the correct configuration with greater certainty, and we can adjust the intervall to fit our needs.
This give us as admins a larger sence of control when managing devices and wanting to make sure that our devices has the correct settings. If you are coming from the GPO world you will be very familiar with this since GPOs refreshes every 90 minutes (default), and now you can make Intune work the same way! Yet one less thing that you will be missing from the old world!
Hope you find this as usefull as I do, and happy clicking!
Did you know that you can get automated alerts for certain events for your Cloud PC environment?
Microsoft released this feature back in February of 2023, and has added quite a few differents alerts by now, not only the network, provisioning, and image upload error alerts.
Today, you can find 6 different alerts you can setup:
Azure Network Connection failure
Cloud PC grace period
Cloud PCs that aren’t available (preview)
Frontline Cloud PCs near concurrency limit (preview)
Provisioning failure impacting Cloud PCs
Upload failure for custom images
You can select how you want to get notified in the event of something happening,
How to set up alerts?
To setup alerts, head into Microsoft Intune and navigate to Tenant Administration and find Alerts in the menu.
In this first view you will see any active alerts that you have in your environment. Like this alert that I have one Cloud PC in grace period.
If we move over to the second tab, that’s where we can configure our alerts.
As you can see, you have six different alerts you can enable. You don’t need them all, enable the ones which makes sense to you. as you can see I have not configured the “Azure Network Conneciton failure” nor “Upload custom image” in my tenant, since I don’t use these features at the moment. A sharp eye might notive that “Fronline Cloud PCs near concurrency limit” isn’t configure either, but we will do that now by clicking on the name of the alert.
This will take us to the configuration page.
If we start of with the conditions for the alert, these are a bit different depending on the alert, but for some you can select another value type. For this one, we will set this to 90% of instances, meaning that if 90% or more of our Frontline Cloud PCs are reaching their concurrency limit, we will get an alert.
Next up is the severity level of this alert. This is up to us to choose the correct level, and we will this at default as a warning.
The status part is defining if this alert should be active or not, so let’s go ahead and change this to ON.
The last part of this is how we want to get notified. We can select to either just get a pop-up in the Intune portal or if an email should be sent somewhere. This could be a great way to e.g. raise tickets in you ITSM tool without needing any additional integrations.
When I get the notification Intune, this is what it looks like:
And this is what the email looks like:
Why use alerts?
So why do we want to use alerts? Well it’s a really good way to get notified if something happens with the Windows 365 service you provide to your users, without you having to sit and look at everything all the time. You could even find issues before they arrise and your IT Helpdesk gets jammed with a lot of calls from end users.
Take a look at alerts if you are a Windows 365 administrator, this could really simplify your life!
I thought I would share a few things you might not know that you are able to do in Intune, small things that might not be related to device management itself but you might not be aware off!
As all of you know, Microsoft Intune is constantly changing, there are news and updates each week. This means that some of these things might change in the future, who knows!
But let’s kick it off. Here are 5 things you didnt know you could do in Intune.
Change language and region
You have probably seen the settings icon in the top of the Intune portal, this is where you can access the portal settings.
When you click the settings icon, you will be taken to the Portal settings pane of Microsoft Intune.
As you can see, there are a lot of different things you can modify and control. E.g. if you have multiple directories or subscriptions you can change which your default is. This is also where you enable darkmode (if you are like me and prefer darkmode). But I though we would focus on the language settings.
If we navigate to the “Language + region” pane, we can select which language we want the portal to be in. This settings is not a global setting, this only affect my session. Like many others, I prefer to use the English version of MS Intune (the translations in Swedish are a bit wild some times), but I still want my regional format to be Swedish. I can easily select my preferences here and just hit apply and it will refresh the session with a new language for me.
If you are familiar with Azure or Entra, this works the same way!
Modify the left side menu
We probably all know and love the left side navigation menu, this is where we can select if we want to access devices or apps for example.
But did you know you can customize this menu?
If you navigate to “All services“, you will see a table of all the available services within Microsoft Intune, and if you look closely you will notice that there is a small star next to each service.
By default today, all is marked except for “Surface Management Portal” and if you want easy access to that you can simply just star that one too and it will show up in the navigation menu.
But let’s say I’m only interested in seeing devices, apps and groups, I can simply just mark them with a star and they will be the only one displayed in the navigation menu alongside with reports which we cannot remove.
One other neat feature is that you can rearrange the order of the navigation menu by simply dragging the headings around if you want to sort the differently.
Easily change between accounts
If you are using multiple accounts in Microsoft Intune, there is a simple way to just change which account you are using. If you have ever worked in the Azure portal, this is the same functionality.
Simply click your profile picture in the top right corner and sign in with a diffetent user. When you have signed in with an additional user, you can easily just switch by selecting that account.
Access the PIM portal
For most administrational roles, you use Microsoft Entra Priviledge Identity Management, or simply PIM, to grant the priviledged role that you will use in order for your account not to have that role all the time.
This can be setup in many different ways, and you can even PIM Intune roles if you use group feature.
However, you don’t need to go through the Entra portal to access your PIM roles. Simply navigate to Tenant Administration > Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management and you will reach the same portal.
From here, you can simply activate your roles, or approve other requests.
Shortcut to the Entra portal
Last but not least, when we are on the topic of Microsoft Entra. Did you know that there is a shortcut to the Entra portal in Intune?
Just navigate to All services in the navigation menu, and under “Other consoles” you will find Microsoft Entra.
When you click that link, a new tab will open with the Entra portal!
Okay, something that has been around in Microsoft Intune for quite some time is Scope tags. You know that step before assignment when creating a policy or profile?
In this post, I was thinking we would talk through what it is and what you can use it for since it’s a quite power full tool and very useful if you are working in larger environments and want to delegate rights since you can combine it with the Intune roles to really have a granular setup when it comes to who can do what. If you want to read more about the Intune RBAC setup, have a look at this post I wrote a few years ago called RBAC in Intune- Who does what at the zoo.
What is even scope tags?
Scope tags is not something you use by itself, it is connected to the Intune RBAC setup, since you can control what you different administrators can see and do.
If I have a scope tag called Sweden which I use on my policies, I can create an Intune role granting only permission to see and administrate things related to that scope.
This means that I can grant access to only certain parts of Intune for my administrators, delegating the responsibility to the Swedish organisation to manage Sweden while Norway and Iceland only can manage their things.
How ever, this only applies to Intune roles, so if you use an EntraID role granting more access, like the Intune Administrator role, scopetags are not part of the solution.
In general, it’s a good idea NOT to use the Intune administrator for all your administrators since this is a very powerfull administrator role also outside Intune. It is the Global Admin of Intune almost (but not as power full).
Setting up Scope tags
To use scope tags, you need to define them which you do by navigating to Tenant Admin – Roles and select Scope tags. You will see that you have one default scope tag, but you can add more in here.
To create a Scope tag, you simply press “+ Create” and we will give our scope tag name, which will be the one used in the portal. We can also add a comment explaining what this scope tag is used for which can be a good idea. When done, click Next.
In the assignment step, we will add a group which contains all out Swedish devices. There are a lot of different ways you could set this group up given that you want to not only catch the Windows devices, you would also probably like to see their mobile devices. In this example, I have a dynamic group looking for all Windows devices tagged with the Autopilot group tag “SE” using this dynamic membership rule.
When I’ve added my group I will click Next to get to the last step in the scopetag creation.
On the last step you can review your settings before creating it. If everything looks like you want it to, click Create and your scope tag will be created.
Repeat this step for all the scope tags you need, as you can see in my lab I currently have 3 scope tags and the default one.
Using scope tags for roles in Intune
Now that we have create our scope tags, we can add them to a role in Intune as a first step.
Head into Tenant Admin – Roles and select “All roles“. Then find the role that you want to configure, we will use the “Help Desk Operator” as an example.
Click on the name of the role to configure it and you want to head into “Assignments” which is where we define who has this role.
In here, we will click on “+ Assign” to add a new assignment. Since we are setting this up for the Swedish help desk, we will call this “Sweden“. Click Next.
On the next step we will add the group of Swedish help desk operators by clicking on “Add group” and selecting our Help desk Sweden user group. Click Next.
Next step is to add the scope groups, which devices and user we want to be able to manage. This means that we can limit this even further. For now, we will select all users and all devices and click Next.
In the next and last configuration step we will select what scope tag this Help Desk Operator is allowed operate with, meaning what devices and other object can it interact with. In this step we will select our Sweden scope tag and click Next.
As usual, before creating the role assignment you can review you options. Then click Create.
How does it look for my Help Desk Operator in Sweden?
So, what does things now look like for my Swedish help desk operator which we can call Moltas? Well, Moltas can only see things which has the scope tag Sweden. He can see all user and all groups, but he can only see two devices in the environment, since these are part of the scope tag Sweden.
If we compare this to a user with the Intune administrator role, you can see that the view is limited in the amount of devices.
If we take a look at one of the devices Moltas can see, we can actually see that it automatciallu got the scope tag Sweden since it’s a part of the “All Sweden device” group mentioned further up in the post.
We can also add scope tags to profiles that we create, making it possible to grant permission to e.g. one business area to manage their on profiles, applications and so on.
Since I’ve added the scope tag to this profile, Moltas will be able to see this one but not the rest of my profiles, but given his role he will not be able to do any modifications to this profile (Help Desk Oprator does not allow that).
Worth mentioning is also that if this administrator would have the rights to create objects, all their objects would have the scope tag Sweden.
Key take aways
Using scope tags and combinding it with the Intune roles makes it really easy and power full to delegate access to local administrator or different business units to operate their own settings in a bigger tenant. You can e.g. make sure that the local IT support in Sweden cannot see or touch the Norweigan devices.
I really like this feature, and it’s really convinient in larger environments. You can off course limit the access even further by not granting access to all users and all devices, limiting it even further.
Okay so this is a blogpost I’ve been putting off for a long time without any good reason to be honest. I think I’m wanting this to be perfect since it’s a combination of several things I care deeply about. This will probably be like a part 1. So here we go.
TLDR;
One of the benefits of Windows 365 is that it can reduce the environmental footprint of IT operations by shifting the energy consumption and emissions from the end-user devices to the cloud servers. According to a study by Microsoft, the Microsoft cloud is between 22 and 93 percent more energy efficient than traditional enterprise datacenters, depending on the specific comparison being made. When taking into account Microsoft’s renewable energy purchases, the Microsoft cloud is between 72 and 98 percent more carbon efficient.
Microsoft has also committed to be a carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste company by 2030, and to protect more land than it uses by 2025. In its 2022 Environmental Sustainability Report, Microsoft shared its progress, challenges, and learnings on its journey to meet these goals. The report also showcases how Microsoft is delivering digital technology for net zero, such as Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, which helps customers measure and manage their environmental impact.
What is Windows 365
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you are familiar with what Windows 365 is, but in case you have missed it let’s do a short intro.
Windows 365 is a cloud-based service to provide what Microsoft calls a Cloud PC. This is in fact a virtual computer based on the Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) platform, but instead of you having to maintain any infrastructure, you consume it as a SaaS solution. The performance of the Cloud PC is based on what license you have purchased. Compared to AVD, you pay a fixed price per month for the license instead of paying for your consumption.
Since this is a cloud service, you can access it from whatever device you prefer, or even just a browser.
Since we can run a controlled and managed Windows device in a remote context, we are open to allowing more secure ways of working from a broader range of devices since we are in full control of the remote session.
The sad truth about hardware
One of the largest environmental impact we have within IT is our devices. Many companies replaces their computers on a ~3 year basis. For a larger company this is a huge amount of new devices being bought every year, and as many devices being decommissioned. The market for reselling computers are growing by the day and we see more and more companies offering this service to their customers, and even consumers.
Computers which are three years old aren’t that old to be fair. They are not the latest and greatest, but can still do a really good job for most usecases.
Reducing the need to renew hardware
By utilizing Windows 365, we can actually extend the life time of a computer since we can run Windows 365 on anything with Windows 10 or never. Windows 11 is one of the major reason hardware will need to be replaced, since there is a Windows 11 only supports Intel 8th generations processors and newer (let’s be fair, Intel is the most commonly used today). 8th generation means mid-2017 as earliest which is about six and a half year ago when this post is being written.
This is something that has been stuck in my head that we will see A LOT of computers being obsolete on the 14th of October 2024. Then Microsoft released a very interesting statement about end of service for Windows 10 and Extended Security Updates (ESUs). You will get the ESU included in the Windows 365 if you are accessing your Cloud PC from a Windows 10 host. This will extend the life of these computers another 3 years.
This means that you could move over to Windows 11 but keep some older hardware around for accessing Cloud PCs. Since there is no Windows 365 Boot for Windows 10, you could build a kiosk based on this post to make sure your users ONLY access their Windows 365 Cloud PC, which would be running Windows 11.
By utilizing Windows 365 and Cloud PCs, we can actually keep our computers current for a much longer time. Instead of getting a new computer with the latest, faster, processor and more memory we can utilize the server grade equipment in the Azure datacenters which are a lot more powerful than our laptops are anyways. Since Windows 365 is license based, this means that when we need more computing power on our Cloud PC, we can upgrade the license and after a reboot we have a more powerful PC.
Running workloads on shared resources, like in Azure, is much more energy efficient as well. However, lets not forget that data centers uses a lot of energy to be operate. But today Microsoft data centers are run on renewable energy improves this even further while Microsoft is also striving to be carbon negative by 2030.
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