(Originally published on LinkedIn)
I guess by now, most people are back from summer holidays (at least in Sweden) and I always feel that the much-needed summer break acts as a reboot both for motivation and ideas.
This fall will contain a lot of exciting things happening at once. We have a lot of exiting happening. The one that I´m most excited about is introducing Windows Autopilot and an Intune managed PC. This is a TREMENDOUS change for us, and this is probably “part 1”.
Traditionally, we have for the last 20 years or so we have managed computers, in the same way, using on-premises server infrastructure and creating our “own” Windows version. This has gone through several different generations; we are currently on our “generation 4” which is based on Windows 10. We manage these custom images using Config Manager and a bunch of group policies.
That’s how we have “always” done it and we are comfortable doing so.
But what happens when things are moving to the cloud and we change our work habits?
We don´t have the same work style today as we did back when Windows XP was released, not even Windows 8.1. The world has changed, and it keeps on changing. We are moving to consume things as a service and our “office” might not be on the corporate network all the time. Does it make sense to use a client heavily dependent (and designed for) on-premises infrastructure?
After a lot of preparations, we will this fall start testing how we can utilize Intune to manage PCs and enrolling them through Windows Autopilot.
This is truly exciting and a big shift for us, moving from very old-school and wanting to manage everything to more of a light-touch approach where we manage what’s needed to keep the device and information secure.
“Does this setting add any value?”
Coming from an old-school setup we have A LOT of policies and preferences configured. Some makes sense, some are old left-over which never got removed and some are obsolete. We have even found some XP setting which are still there but doesn’t get applied. So how do we decide what to keep?
We did inventory all settings a typical PC has in our environment and did somewhat of an identification of what GPO’s correlates to MDM-policies. But not all these settings make sense in a new world where we want light touch.
Our working thesis has been: “Does this setting add any value?”. By asking us that question, we are trying to avoid configuring things just because there is a setting for it. This has left us with a more relevant configuration. We removed a lot, but also kept a whole lot of settings. So not all our “legacy” settings were irrelevant.
Innovating for all users – lead by the few
In our very first “version” of a modern managed Windows computer, we are leaving ALL on-prem things behind. No co-management, no hybrid-join, no file shares. It’s a clean cut.
However, we still have a lot of things that many users would need which resides on-prem making this new platform not fit for all scenarios at this point. But that was not what we were going for. This will be a cutting-edge platform targeted for those users who can and are willing to break free from the old environment and are using mostly cloud based applications.
However, our objective is to use the learning from this modern platform to improve on our standard platform, helping driving innovation for all our users!
Cutting lead time
One massive thing this will also mean for our end-user is shorter lead times. When setting up a new computer, even if we utilize White glove so that local IT can put their touch on the computer to provide that little extra service only, they can do.
Today, imaging takes from 1,5 hour up to 3 hours for our image (taken into consideration that not all sites has superb internet connection). If we can reduce this down, this means that our users could potentially receive their computer much faster, even if there is a hands on step by a local IT technician if the end-user is not comfortable doing the enrollment them self. Our infrastructure might not be mature yet for full coverage, but we can start on the bigger sites without any issue.
Where are we right now?
Right now, we are in an early pilot phase were we are identifying the last things before we can let some real user try this (we are basically 4-5 people running a cloud managed PC). It’s still limited to a “cloud only” environment without any connection to Config Manager or other on-prem systems, so it will not be for everyone at this stage. But this will help us find the road forward to our next generation workplace.
