Intune goes to the Cloud

Source: Intune goes to the Cloud

First I should apologise for being dead to the world in blog terms since January, but lots has happened and continues to happen.

First, and most importantly, your humble correspondent has been awarded the honour of being a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the Enterprise Mobility arena. Rather than fill this post with explanations, you can read about the MVP Programme and my MVP Exploits at these links. Suffice to say it is an honour and a privilege and one I will try to continue to deserve.

So on to what else has been happening.

In November 2016 I left Microsoft as a full time employee (as reported here) and restarted my old company Excalibur Services (UK) Ltd. We provide training and IT consultancy.

But what has been happening in the world of Microsoft and Enterprise Mobility?

Even more, but I will limit this post to the HUGE changes in Microsoft Intune. You will remember that my last few posts have been about how easy it was to buy, configure and deploy the EM+S suite of products to manage your BYOD, CYOD and other devices for your organisation. Now Microsoft have gone one stage further.

The Intune console was always a bit clunky and quirky having grown organically over the years. What’s more, it required Silverlight to run and that technology has been deprecated. A new console was required, and luckily Microsoft already had the perfect answer: Microsoft Azure.

Intune uses Azure Active Directory as its Identity Management solution and integrates with other users such as Office 365, Dynamic 365 etc. For some time the Intune and Intune App Protection workflow has been available in the Azure portal, but recently it has gone GA (Generally Available) and is no longer a preview version.

Almost all Intune features can now be enabled, configured and monitored from the Azure Portal.

It is even possible to set the Mobile Device Management authority from Azure, one of the last remaining options that required Silverlight. Do note that some features, such as policies created in Silverlight, will not be visible in Azure and vice versa.

Why not create yourself a trial tenant and dive in? Or, if you'd prefer, schedule a 1:1 demo. The next post will be a deep dive into some of the new features introduced and the ways of managing them.