Category: Intune

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Let’s improve onboarding for Windows 365!

a carpenter building a wooden pc

Through out the years, I’ve worked with a lot off different customers, and almost all of them use some kind of ITSM tool (such as Jira ServiceNow) to order new services and hardware for users. This is usually where Windows 365 is added as a service where I as an end user, or manager, can request it.

But what if you don’t have an ITSM tool, but I still want to offer the self-service option?

Well, in Entra ID there is something called “Access packages” which we can use for this puropse. If you want to read more about what that is, check out the Microsoft documentation here.

With Access packages, we can create a self-service portal, where end-users can request memebership to a group. This group can then have a license tied to it, what is also known as Group Based Licensing. The user will then request membership to the group, you can add approvals and set a time frame that this membership should be valid. You can also add access reviews to check in with the user to see if they are still using the service.

So let’s jump into how an easy setup of this would look like, and then have a look at the user experiance. However, this setup is assuming you have already setup group based licensing for Windows 365.

This setup also assumes that you are targeting provisining policies to all users already (I’m using dynamic, country based groups as descibed in this post).

Setting upp Access packages

To set up access packages, we head into the Entra portal (https://entra.microsoft.com) and navigate to Identity > Identity Governance > Entitlement Management and then look for “Access packages” in the menu.

We will just create a very basic setup for this, so lets go ahead and click on “+ New Access Package“. First step is to give your policy a name and descripton. Remeber, the description is a required field. We will leave the catalog to “General” which is the default value. When done, hit next on the bottom of the windows.

Since we want to configure a memebership to a group, select the option “+ Groups and Teams” and find

Since we are just going with default values, you might need to check the “See all Groups and Teams…” check-box in order to find your group. When you have found the group, click select. If you are not already targeting users with a provisioning group, you need to add that here as well.

When you have added your group, remeber to change the Role to member before hitting next.

In the next step, we will define our Request flow. In this example I will make this apply for all users in my tenant, and I will allow all users to place a request.

The next part is to define the approval process. You can also remove approvals completely, but since Windows 365 comes with a cost we want a manager to approve this request. You can also add additional approvers if required. Default value is that manager will be the approved, and we will leave it to default. What you need to add is a “fallback” approver, and as you can see here I added my Help Desk team for this. Choose an approriate user/group for this task.

Last step on this section, is to select how we will enable this request flow. I’ve also enabled the preview features for this example, but you dont need to do that. Just make sure to enable the top one since this is what makes this request available. We will skip the Verified ID part and press the Next button.

On this step, we could add additional questions or justifications for the requestor, but we will leave this to default and press next. We will still get a question for business justification in the request.

Next step is to set the lifecycle for this, which we in this case will set to 180 days since that is roughly 6 months. And just for the purpose of usign access reviews, we will enable that as well but leave all values to default. When you are done, press next until you reach “Review + Create“.

On the last step, you can review all your settings before pressing Create. It will validate your configuration, and if you missed something or something is wrong it will ask you to correct this before moving forward.

We have now successfully create a Access package for our Cloud PCs!

Let’s have a look at what this looks like when a user requests this.

The request flow

The place where you need to direct your users for placing requests is https://myaccess.microsoft.com/ where they will see all available request packages for them. As you can see, I have three different access packages for Cloud PC I can request. To start a request, I simply click on “Request” on the service I want to request.

This windows will then appear, and you just click continue.

Next step is to add a business justification for my request, here I can also set it to a specific period if I like since we enabled that option when setting things up.

I then submit the request and it is sent of to the approver, which in this case is the manager.

Approver experiance

When the request has been sent, the approved will recieve an email looking like this, where they are asked to approve the request. This email also contains the business justification added by the requestor.

When the approver clicks the blue button in the email, they are redirected to the approval site on My Access.

When the approved selects to approve the request, they will be asked to enter a justification before approval is sent.

When the approver has approved the request, a confirmation email will be sent to the user. However, what is imporant to keep in mind is that this will initiate the provisioning of the Cloud PC.

The process of provisioning will now start and the Cloud PC will be done within usually 30-40 minutes depending on how fast your provisining policy is!

Key take aways

Estalishing a good on- and off-boarding process is important in all IT organsations. This walk though shows you that you can establish this without setting up more advanced tools. However, this is not close to as powerful as proper ITSM tools, but you can build simpler request flows to suite your needs.

This principle can also be applied to other things, not just Windows 365 and Cloud PCs.

Categories
Intune

Where is device heading

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.

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Improving Decision Making with Intune Advanced Analytics Data

computers, clouds and reports

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 Intune Advanced 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.

For Intune, the needed URL is:

https://*.events.data.microsoft.com

If you want to read more about how to set this up for Configuration Manager managed devices, check out the Microsoft Learn page.

Getting access to the data

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 nameMicrosoft Entra roleIntune roleEndpoint analytics permissions
Global AdministratorYesRead/write
Intune Service AdministratorYesRead/write
School AdministratorYesRead/write
Endpoint Security ManagerYesRead only
Help Desk OperatorYesRead only
Read Only OperatorYesRead only
Reports ReaderYesRead 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.

  • Custom device scopes
  • Anomalies
  • Enhanced device timeline
  • Device query
  • Battery health

If you want to read more about what’s included, I would suggest checking out this Microsoft Learn article.

Reviewing my devices

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!

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Summer recap – what did we miss?

summer admin

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.

Cross region disaster recovery in Windows 365 | Microsoft Learn

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.

Microsoft Teams on Cloud PCs | Microsoft Learn

Cloud PC support for FIDO devices and passkeys on macOS and iOS (preview)

Windows 365 Cloud PCs now support FIDO devices and passkeys for Microsoft Entra ID sign in on macOS and iOS.

Updated default settings for Windows 365 security baselines

Microsoft has released an updated version of the security baseline for Windows 365. You can find a full list of the updated settings here: List of the settings in the Windows 365 Cloud PC security baseline in Intune.

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.

GPU Cloud PCs in Windows 365 | Microsoft Learn

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.

Configure the clipboard transfer direction in Azure Virtual Desktop | Microsoft Learn

Intune updates

The list for Windows 365 was long (in the aspect of Windows 365 updates), but there has been even more Intune updates.

If you want to read the full list of updates during the summer months, check out the full list here.

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.

iOS/iPadOS device enrollment guide for Microsoft Intune | Microsoft Learn

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.

Configure the Microsoft Managed Home Screen app for Android Enterprise

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!

Microsoft Copilot in Intune

New setting in the Device Control profile for Attack surface reduction policy

Microsoft has added the “Allow Storage Card” setting to the Attack surface reduction policy, which can also be found in the settings catalog.

AllowStorageCard 

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.

Account protection policy for endpoint security in Intune

New Intune report and device action for Windows enrollment attestation (public preview)

There is a new report in public preview for finding out if a device has attested and enrolled securly while being hardware-backed.

Windows enrollment attestation

New support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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.

Deployment guide: Manage Linux devices in Microsoft Intune 

Newly available Enterprise App Catalog apps for Intune

The Enterprise App Catalog has updated to include additional apps. For a complete list of supported apps.

Apps available in the Enterprise App Catalog.

New actions for Microsoft Cloud PKI

The Microsoft Cloud PKI has been updated with some new features.

  • Delete: Delete a CA.
  • Pause: Temporarily suspend use of a CA.
  • Revoke: Revoke a CA certificate.

Delete Microsoft Cloud PKI certification authority

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.

Categories
Intune Tips & Tricks

Are the settings what you think they are?

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!

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Alerts for Windows 365

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!

Categories
Intune Intune for noobs

5 things you didn’t know you could do in Microsoft Intune

person working with intune

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!

Categories
Intune

Intune Scope tags – What is it and what can we use it for?

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.

(device.devicePhysicalIds -any _ -eq "[OrderID]:SE")

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.

Categories
Intune

Windows 365 Boot – What is the fuzz about?

CloudPC pop art

If you are, just like me, a BIG Windows 365 fan you probably haven’t missed the news around Windows 365 Boot. There was an update released in the end of January which enabled what is called Windows 365 Boot Dedicated mode and Windows 365 Boot Shared mode.

There are a lot of awesome posts out there how to configure these, like these to from my fellow Windows 365 MVP Dominiek Verham, which I really recommend you to check out!

Two really awesome posts about how to get started.

But why should you use it and why should we pay attention to this?

In this post, I’ll discuss a little around my view on why these to features will play a crutial part in the Windows 365 journey and the future of Windows. These

And also let’s adress the elephant in the room. Windows 365 Boot is basically Microsofts take on thing clients on Windows. This has been done before by others, but never using the standard management tools. I think that is one of the key things with Windows 365 Boot, we manage a regular Windows installation with Microsoft Intune.

Windows 365 Boot Dedicated mode

Lets start of with what it is.

Windows 365 Boot Dedicated mode is a new Windows 365 feature which enables you to have a PC which is using Windows 365 Boot that is, just like the name says, is dedicated to one user. Right now, this feature is in public preview.

Previosuly when we have looked at Windows 365 Boot, you have not had a user assigned to the machine which meant that using passwordless solutions like e.g. Windows Hello for Business was not possible.

Now with Windows 365 Dedicated mode, I can have my PC setup as a Windows 365 machine and each time I sign in to my computer I will end up in my Cloud PC session using Windows Hello for Business.

This opens for a lot of new cool scenarios which we could do and I think this might be the bigger and maybe a scenario which is harder for many to related to. We are so used to having our “own” computer locally, and maybe connect out to a virtual session when ever we need to switch context to a different environment or such. This would make your primary device a cloud based computer, which in my world is kind of awesome.

Some scenarios I can think of top of mind where this could be usefull are:

  • Extend life of older hardware
  • Upgrade a PC to a higher spec without needing to have physcal access to the device
  • Provide cheaper hardware for certain scenarios
  • Ensure data is not lost when using devices in more extreme environments (hardware failure)

One kind of weird scenario that came to mind was also that you could by your self also switch between computers, by selecting in the Windows 365 web portal which device to connect to. This means that you could for extended times work from one typ och device, and then easliy change this through the webportal.

Why should we care?

To be honest, I think this scenario could potenitally be a hard sell to IT people, since we are very used to working with out operating system locally. The host machine would still require to run Windows 11, but you would never really see it and you would still need to patch the OS on a regular basis.

I think the biggest selling point here is that if you go with a Cloud PC in this way, you will always run on “hardware” which is preforming. No need to wory about disk crashes, slowness or anything like that. You will also gain insane traffic thorugh put, since your computer is not actually connected to your own network. It’s connected to the Microsoft network which is playing in a different legue when it comes to upload/download speeds then our usual home internet. This would actually benefit you if you work with a lot of large files, OneDrive and SharePoint syncs insanly fast. This is however a feature of Windows 365 as a service, not the dedicated mode.

In my mind, this is something we need to keep attention to how it develops, even if many of us are not ready to take the leap today. My bet is that THIS will be a big part of the future of Windows.

Windows 365 Boot Shared mode

Windows 365 Boot Shared mode is more like the Windows 365 Boot which went into GA last September, but with some updates. One of the major differences is that you can now add your company logo on the sign-in page to make it more relatable to your brand.

The concept behind this is to provide a shared workstation which many different users work from. Looking at different scenarios I’ve seen with customers, this could cover that “kiosk” computer in the break room in a workshop. Or maybe a good and simple way to provide a great experiance to personal working in a callcenter where you don’t have your own desk. And why not that sales station which is used by several people.

If you combine the Windows 365 Boot Shared mode with a Windows 365 Frontline license, you pretty much hit the sweet spot. Then you can sprinkle with a FIDO2 key (like Yubikey) and you even simplify the sign-in process and make it passwordless!

One big issue has always been “how do we provide a great experiance on a shared device”. Traiditionally, there has always been an issue with user profiles (if you have to many things break) but that can be addressed with the shared device policy in Microsoft Intune. However, you are still not giving a full computer experiance to the users, they are usually pretty limited and distributing applications is not as smooth as if you had a personal computer.

This would also mean that if you are working in a setup where you move around a lot, and maybe not always come back to the same computer, you can continue your work exactly where you left of but from a different computer.

Windows 365 Boot Shared mode gives you that personal experiance, but on a shared device.

Why should we care?

One thing that always seams to be a complex and tricky scenario to solve are those shared devices, especially if the user moves around a lot. Think clients of different sorts has always been a big thing here, but for many IT admins the thin clients means another tool to administrate in, instead of the tool they are spend most of their time in for managing the other devices. Using Windows 365 Boot we can leverage Microsoft Intune and bulding thin clients on Windows, by just deploying a set of policies from Microsoft Intune.

For many organization, intorducing a new management tool for thin clients is a little bit of a bump in the road since this means getting that tool approved, setup and educating the adminsitrators on how to use it if there is no pre-exisiting knowledge. It’s not necesserially a hard thing to learn a new tool, but it could slow down the implementation process for some organizations.

Key take aways

What I think we need to think about is that Windows as we know it is about to change, it won’t be over night but something is happening now. Imagine when we started seeinf Office 365 which later became Microsoft 365? That was a journey, and I think that right now we are seeing the start of this journey for Windows. I might be naive and sprinkled a little wishfull thinking over this whole thing, but I really think we will see a change over the next couple of years in what we think of as Windows and what we expect. Mind you, these are my personal thoughts and ideas.

However, the Windows 365 Boot features brings some really intersting things to the table. We can now easily deploy and manage thin clients without needing any additional tools or licenses. I think that is pretty sweet as someone who works with customers who hare heavily invested in the Microsoft echosystem. It might not be as far along and flexible as e.g. IGEL. But this would potentially get more companies started with thin clients since there really isn’t any roadblocks anymore like there used to.

Categories
Intune

Intune Suite – Exploring Enterprise App Management

Microsoft has now released all the parts they promised back in March of 2023. On the first of February, a lot of cool things saw the light of day without the preview label. We initially saw Endpoint Privilege Management and Remote Help as part of the Intune Suite, with Advanced Analytics, Cloud PKI, Enterprise App Management and Microsoft Tunnel for MAM.

In this post, we will focus on the Enterprise App Management feature which will help IT admins to keep their applications up to date by using a managed catalog of applications (much like SCAPMANN, PatchMyPC and such).

Before we begin. If you have never heard of the Intune Suite, it is a bundle of premium add-ons for Intune making it even more powerful by unlocking new functionality.

What is Enterprise App Management?

Enterprise App Management is a catalog of third-party applications, applications not developed by Microsoft, which is provided in a simple store-like manner in Intune. The catalog today consist of a little over 90 applications which are maintained by the Microsoft service, a list that will hopefully grow over time adding even more applications. The Enterprise App Management service takes care of both packaging the initial application but also managing any updates released fot the application, streamlining the work for the application team!

The concept behind this, is to ease the workload for application administrators not having to package all applications. The easiest way to position this is to think of it as a time saving tool, our packaging team won’t have to care about packaging the simpler applications which might be updated quite frequently. They can instead focus on the more unique and complex applications for the organisation.

Enterprise App Mangement comes in the Intune Suite bundle or can be purchased separately as a stand alone service. What is important to keep in mind here is to make sure you buy enough licenses to cover all your users since it’s licensed based on users in your environment.

How to get started?

Once you have made sure that you have the licenses for either the Intune Suite or Enterprise App Management (you can activate a 90 day trial in the licensing portal to test it out), you can use the new option in the App type for Windows in Microsoft Intune.

At the bottom you will see a new option, Enterprise App Catalog app, which is the Enterprise App Management service!

Once you have selected this as the app type, you will get a reminder that you need to obtain the correct licensing for the service.

When you add an application from the Enterprise App Catalog, it will be added as a Win32 app, but called Windows catalog app. To select your app, simply click “Search the Enterprise App Catalog“.

You will now see the full list of apps in a fly-out menu to the right where you can select the app you need.

In this example, we will select 7zip as the application we want to deploy. When we have chosen our app, we click “Next” at the bottom of the screen.

In the next step we can select which version of the app we need, for 7Zip there is only one version. Click “Select” at the bottom of the screen when you have chosen your version.

When we have chosen our application, the application information will be pre-populated. If you do not need to do any modifications to the app information, just click “Next” at the bottom of the screen.

You can now notice that the install- and uninstall command for the application has automatically been added, and also the return codes.

Next page is as always for Win32 apps the requirements where we can add any additional requirements we have identified. As you can see, the mandatory fields will be pre-populated and we can just move to the next step.

What I really like is that the service also add detections rules for the app. So just hit “Next” to move to the last step!

What is a bit different from adding your own applications is that you never add the assignments as part of this initial step. So last step is “Review and Create”. Once the application has been created, you will be able to add assignments to your app. Now click “Add app” to finish the process.

The app will now be created, which takes just a few seconds, not even enough time to go and refill that coffee cup you just finished!

Once the app has been added, you can add assignments just as any other app by going to Properties on the app and add your target groups.

Updating an application

Enterprise App Management is created to keep your applications updated. The service will utilize self-updating features of the applications where ever possible to minimize the effort from an admin side. If self-updating is enabled for the app, it will automatically be updated on the client.

If self-updating is not available for the app, a new version of the app will added with the needed superseedence relations for it to be replaced, mening that you will have both the new and the old version visible in Microsoft Intune.

Do you want to read more? Check out this Microsoft articles: