Tag: msintune

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:

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Get started with Microsoft Dev Box

Some of you might have seen something called Microsoft Dev Box flash by in your feeds. Something called Dev Box doesn’t really sound like something device-related, it sounds more like something your developers would care about. They probably will, but there is a big reason you should care too.

Microsoft Dev Box is a new tool in the toolbox for you, this time to provide Cloud PCs to your developers or such. There are many similarities between Dev Box and Windows 365, but also Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). However, your developers can themself deploy computers to your tenant based on a template that you create, which means that a developer could create a new test PC when they need one without really involving you as an admin.

Microsoft Dev Box is not licensed-based like your Windows 365 Cloud PC, instead, it’s consumption-based like an AVD. But you have the simplicity of setting up new computers from Windows 365, so it’s almost like a mix of the two. However, the user target group is different since you can get more powerful machines that are deployed by the user themself.

You can read more about the Microsoft Dev Box here, and what Microsoft calls a “Dev Workstation in the cloud”.

Getting started with Microsoft Dev Box

To get started with Microsoft Dev Box you need the following:

  • An Azure subscription
  • Azure AD
  • Intune tenant
  • Windows licenses (typically as part of your EMS or M365 license)

Setting up the Microsoft Dev box is completely taken care of in the Azure portal, not the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center.

To start off, you need to head over to portal.azure.com and make sure you have an active Azure subscription to provision this. Then, search for Microsoft Dev Box.

This is where your different environments will be hosted. You can have multiple Dev Boxes set up for different parts of the organization. In each Dev Box, you can also create different projects. In the real world, you would probably configure this in a landing zone specifically set up for your dev-users who will work on certain projects.

The first step is to create a new Dev-center by pressing “+ Create” in the Microsoft Dev Box pane. Select what subscription and resource group you want to deploy this too and give your Dev-center a name. You will also need to select an Azure region where your machines will be hosted. Since this is a preview, the selection of what Azure data center regions are available is limited. Once you have selected this, press “Review + Create” and create your Dev-center.

Once the Dev-center has successfully deployed, you need to create a Network Connection where you define if your Dev Box PCs should be hybrid-joined or Azure AD joined. Head back to the Microsoft Dev Box pane and select Network Connections (or search Azure for Network Connections).

Select “+ Create” to create a new Network Connection by selecting what subscription and resource group to use. Also, give the network connection a name and select what Azure Vnet you would like to use (if you haven’t created a Vnet already, you will need to do that first). Press “Review + Create” and create your Network Connection.

In this example I’m using Azure AD joined devices as selected as “Domain join type”. If you want to use Hybrid join instead, you will need to add some additional information about your domain.

Once you have created your Network Connection, you will need to create a project. This is where gather each project you would like to use the Dev Box PCs in and define what machines are available by creating Dev Box pools. In the Microsoft Dev Box pane, select Projects.

To create a new Project, click “+ Create” and select what subscription and resource group you want to use. Select which Dev-center you would to use and give your project a name. Press “Review + Create” and create your Project.

Now we need to define what machines are available for our users by creating a Dev box pool. There are a few different “sizes” available, and you can read more about them on Microsoft site about Microsoft Dev Box, where you can find out the pricing for each.

To create a new Dev box definition, navigate to the project you created earlier and select Dev box definition on the bottom of the left-hand menu.

To create a new Dev box definition, select “+ Create“. Give your definition a name and then select a Windows image to use, in this example we will use a Microsoft-provided image, but you could upload your own if you would like. Make the appropriate selections of what size you would like on the machine and click “Create”.

The next step is to create a Dev box pool in your project, do this by navigating to your project you created earlier and selecting Dev box pool.

Create a new Dev box pool by pressing “+ Create” and giving your new pool a name. Select the Dev box definition created earlier and also the network connection. You will also need to confirm that your organization has Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can read more about what that means here.

Once you have filled out this, create the dev box pool by clicking “Create” at the bottom of the page.

The last thing we need to do is to assign users the rights to consume machines and work in our project. Prior to this, it’s a good idea to create an Azure AD group that will contain our users.

To configure the access to our project we will head into “Access control (IAM)” in our project.

To add a new assignment, click “+Add” and select “Add role assignment”. In the list of roles, find and select the “DevCenter Dev Box User” role and press next.

On the next page, add your Azure AD group which contains the users who should have access to the project. Once you have added this group to “Members” press “Review + assign” to finalize your role assignment.

You can verify that the assignment was successful by looking in the list for the role and validating that your group is listed.

And that’s it! You have now successfully prepared your environment to use Microsoft Dev Box!

User experience

For users to create new Microsoft Dev Box machines, they will need to access devbox.microsoft.com and sign in with their user account.

Once signed in, the experience is similar to the Windows 365 end-user portal, but there is a new button called “+New Dev box” where users can deploy machines themself.

Once you click that button, a fly-out will appear where you can see the specification on the machine you are allowed to deploy (based on the definition we made earlier) and you are asked to give your machine a name. Once you have given the machine a name, which will be the name displayed to you for your convenience (MEM will show a CPC-xxxxx name), press “Create“.

The creation of a machine will take somewhere around 30-90 minutes. Once the machine is done, it will show in the portal where you are right now but also in the Remote Desktop app where you have all your other Windows 365 machines. A bonus fact is that it will also appear in the Windows 365 portal, marked as Dev box, but you cannot create new machines from there.

Once the machine has been created, you can connect to it and start using it!

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Disabling ESP on Cloud PC

One thing you will notice if you are deploying Cloud PCs is that the Enrollment Status Page (ESP) from Windows Autopilot will or might appear when a machine is being set up. I’ve seen numerous instances where the ESP has failed causing the Cloud PC to lock out the user at the initial start. This is usually fixed by reprovisioning, but an unnecessary call to the service desk can cause frustration with your users and your administrators.

The ESP is not an important part of the Windows 365 provisioning in most cases, hence it can be disabled by a custom policy.

Create the policy

To create a custom configuration policy, go to the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center (endpoint.microsoft.com) and navigate to Devices > Windows > Configurations Profiles.

Select to create a new profile and select Custom as template.

Give your profile a name based on your naming convention and press Next.

Add a new OMA-URI setting by pressing Add.

OMA-URI: ./Vendor/MSFT/DMClient/Provider/MS DM Server/FirstSyncStatus/SkipUserStatusPage

Data type: Boolean

Value: True

Save your setting and press Next.

Select to target All devices but filtered to only target Windows 365 devices. You can read more about how to do that in this blog post about filters.

Finish the wizard by clicking Next until you reach the last step, then click Create.

You have now successfully created a configuration profile that will skip the ESP for all your Cloud PCs.

Summary

The ESP is something that in Windows Autopilot is very useful, but for Windows 365 it’s not crucial. This will also reduce the risk of random errors during provisioning.

Applications that are needed before the user starts working can be assigned using the assignments to “All Devices” and filter out your Cloud PCs since this will evaluate a lot faster than Azure AD groups.