Categories
Intune

Windows 365 Boot – What is the fuzz about?

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:

Categories
Intune

Copilot in Windows – How to turn it off using MS Intune

As everyone knows by now, Copilot is coming to Windows. For people in some parts of the world (e.g. USA) this is already a reality. But for us in Europe, we are still waiting for it to be made available.

I rarely write posts about how to disable things, I’m a fan of giving the power to the end-user to use the new awesome tools made available for them. But Copilot is a massive thing, and for many organizations this is both a legal/policy issue, and a technical readiness issue. We need to be able to provide our users with services in a controlled way.

Many of the larger organizations I’ve been working with over the years take this approach, enabling new services in a controlled way.

So, let’s look at how we can control this using Microsoft Intune. In this post, we will not dig into what Copilot for Windows is.

Creating a policy

As usual, my focus is on cloud solutions so we will look into how you can do this using Microsoft Intune and not GPOs.

Today, there is no Settings Catalog, so we need to rely on a Custom policy which we create by heading into the Device blade, choosing Windows > Configuration Profiles and select “+ Create” > “New policy“. Then we select Windows 10 and later as platform, and use Template > Custom as profile type.

As usual, start of by giving your profile a good name based on your naming convention.

Now, lets add a custom setting by pressing the “Add” button.

Add the following information to your custom entry:

Name: Disable Windows Copilot
Description: 
OMA-URI: ./User/Vendor/MSFT/Policy/Config/WindowsAI/TurnOffWindowsCopilot
Data type: Integer
Value: 1

Should look something like this and then hit save at the bottom of the fly out.

You have now successfully added a custom CSR setting.

Hit Next at the bottom of the screen and assign your policy to a user/device group. As always, if you are doing this in production, start with a test group before going for broad deployment.

For this demo purpose, I’ve added the built in “All users” group.

Skip the “Applicability rules” and head to “Review + Create” and review your profile before creating it. Once the profile has been created, the waiting game starts for the policy to apply. As usual, you can speed this up by pressing “Sync” on any of your devices that will be targeted.

When the policy has been applied, the Copilot icon will be removed from the task bar.

Doing a controlled roll-out

We have currently removed Copilot for all the users in your environment, but how do we start enabling it again?

Well, we need to do two things:

  • Create a group for our allowed users/devices
  • Exclude them from the policy we just created

Since the default value for the Windows Copilot feature is to be enabled, we don’t really need to add a new policy. We can just exclude our targeted users/devices. This also makes broad deployment easy since we can gradually just exclude users/devices until we want to enable it for everyone.

Please be aware that the change is not instant, the device needs to check-in before the policy is updated (but it’s fast when you do a forced sync).

Take away

So, would we disable this for all users and do a controlled roll-out? Well new features are not always easy for end-users to gasp or even understand that they have. People within IT tend to always want the latest and greatest and be early adopters. But “real” end-users are not always like that. We need to make sure that we can get information out to our end-users about this awesome new feature.

There might also be that we need to do some assessments around the service before we can enable it in our environment, this could be both legal and internal policy that is controlling this.

But as always, I really encourage you to enable this for your end-users once it’s available in your region. For us in Europe, we will have to wait a bit longer, but looking at the recent announcements around a Copilot-button on all Windows keyboards, I think we can really tell where we are heading with this.

So please, don’t just disable this for the sake of disabling. And if you do disable it, have a plan to enable it. It will bring awesome value to your end-users (especially if you have Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses).

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Let’s move our Cloud PC!

I actually ran into this working with a customer. We had setup the Cloud PCs using an Azure Vnet in connected to the wrong landing zone (test environment) and we had 100+ Cloud PCs up and running and there was no possibility due to internal processes to move that network to the production environment.

This could also be relevant if you want to move a provisioning policy from one Microsoft hosted network region to another.

In this post we will cover how this looks when using Microsoft hosted networks, but they could just as well be Azure Network Connections. The beauty is that we don’t need to re-provision them, we can just update the provisioning policy!

Update provisning profile

Since we are moving from one Microsoft hosted network to another, we won’t need to do any updates outside the provisioning policy. If we are moving to another Azure Network Connection, we need to first create a new connector for our new network. This could be in the same subscription but be another subnet for example. Once you have created this, you can move on to updating the provisning policy.

So, the first step is to head into our provisioning policy. In this example we are updating our policy which is currently set up to use US East as a the region, but we want to move this to Europe instead.

What we need to do here is to update the geography and region in our policy, and of course also the name since I have the region in my policy.

Once I’ve done my updates to the region, I simply click next to the bottom of the screen, and I end up on the summary page where I as always get an overview of my policy. When I’m done reviewing this, I click Update.

But we are not done yet. We also need to apply this update to our machines, unless we do that this only applies to newly provisioned Cloud PCs, and we want to move all of them to the EU.

When we are back on the overview blade for our policy, there is a action at the top called “Apply current configuration”.

When we click on this text, we get prompted whit this pop-up asking us if we want to apply the region change or the SSO change. Since we didn’t make any SSO changes in this policy, things would happen, but this is a fantastic way to enable SSO for all your Cloud PCs without having to redeploy them. But let’s select the “Apply region change” and hit Apply.

Once you have applied the change, your Cloud PCs will start updating.

During the update, the Cloud PC will not be available since work is being done in the back end.

Once the move has been completed, which took about 10-15 minutes for me, you can sign back into the Cloud PC and keep using it in the new region!

Categories
Digital Transformation Intune Windows 365

Back from vacation – what did we miss?

Like the swede I am, I’ve been off work for the last 4 weeks to get my summer vacation. I’ve actually done my best to try to stay away from IT stuff this summer, to disconnect and focus on other things (like golf and getting our house in order).

But the world of IT does not slow down just because of summer, so here is a summary of some of the highlights that I missed during my time off!

I got renewed as MVP

Okay, this I already knew before the summer. But I was awarded for my 2nd year as an MVP within Windows and Devices for IT. I’m truly honored to be awarded for yet another year and being part of such a cool community of awesome people!

Ola Ström | Most Valuable Professionals (microsoft.com)

I will be speaking at WPNinja Summit

I was picked to do two session at the WPNinja Summit in Baden, Switzerland, the 27th to 29th of September.

I will do one session about Windows 365 networks and one about how to do better deployments of Windows 365.

I’m really looking forward to this and I hope to see you all there!

Windows 365 Switch in public preview

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, Microsoft introduced three big new features coming to Windows 365. In May, Windows 365 Boot reached public preview as the first of the three. Now in August, the second and maybe my favorite, Windows 365 Switch reached public preview!

Windows 365 Switch lets you switch between your physical PC and your Cloud PC through the task viewer, just like the other desktops you can have. It’s a really cool feature and I will cover this in a blogpost the upcoming weeks!

You can read more about it in the official Microsoft blogpost found here: Windows 365 Switch now available in public preview – Microsoft Community Hub

Windows 365 Frontline released

This was actually announced before I left for summer vacation, but Windows 365 Frontline finally reached general availability!

For those of you not familiar with this concept, this is a different licensing modell designed for scenarios where the users are not using their device all the time, user who work in shift where you have users coming an going. The concept is that you buy one license, but you get three Cloud PCs but only one can be used at the time.

It sounds a little bit tricky, I know, but I covered this in an earlier blog post which you can have a look at.

Read more about it in the Microsoft blogpost: Windows 365 Frontline is now generally available | Windows IT Pro Blog (microsoft.com)

What’s new in Windows 365?

Windows 365 got some other great updates during the summer as well as Microsoft released a lot of new features in both July and August.

Some of the new features released was:

  • Move Cloud PC is now generally available
  • New setting to allow users to reprovision their own Cloud PC
  • Azure network connection (ANC) least privilege update
  • Provide feedback button for admins is now generally available
  • Windows 365 web client camera support (preview)
  • Group-based license support for Cloud PC resizing
  • Windows 365 app update notifications for users

You can read more in details here about the new features: What’s new in Windows 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn

Windows 11 23h2 release update

Microsoft released new information about the Windows 11 23h2 update coming later this year. It is currently scheduled to be released in Q4 and will be released as an enablement package. This means that there are no big changes coming to the code base of Windows 11, and you can keep doing you testing on Windows 11 22h2 if you are still transitioning over to Windows 11.

Microsoft also mentions a Windows 11 LTSC version in this update, which means that if you are waiting for that release, you can start preparing.

Windows client roadmap update: July 2023 – Microsoft Community Hub

What’s new in Intune?

As per usual, Microsoft Intune has gotten it’s weekly updates during the summer. I think the most impactful update was the fact that uninstalling applications as an end-user in Company Portal is FINNALLY available! I know this has been something a lot of IT Pros has been waiting for. There are also a lot of new stuff in the 2307 Service release.

Some highlights:

  • Uninstall Win32 and Microsoft store apps using the Windows Company Portal
  • Use the Turn off the Store application setting to disable end user access to Store apps, and allow managed Intune Store apps
  • New BitLocker profile for Intune’s endpoint security Disk encryption policy
  • Intune supports new Google Play Android Management API
  • Change to default settings when adding Windows PowerShell scripts
  • New settings available for the iOS/iPadOS web clip app type
  • Settings insight within Intune Security Baselines is generally available
  • Tamper protection support for Windows on Azure Virtual Desktop
  • Endpoint Privilege Management support to manage elevation rules for child processes

What’s new in Microsoft Intune | Microsoft Learn

Screen capture protection and watermark

During the summer Microsoft updated how you can enable screen captrue protection and watermarks for Windows 365 (and Azure Virtual Desktop).

Previously, you had to upload a custom ADMX template to enable these settings (or GPO), but they have now been made available in the built-in ADMX profile in Intune, making this setting much more accessible.

I will cover this more in a future blog post

Azure Virtual Desktop Watermarking Support – Microsoft Community Hub

Screen capture protection in Azure Virtual Desktop – Azure | Microsoft Learn

Microsoft Inspire 2023

During the summer, Microsoft also held their Inspire conference which is usually more targeted towards partners, but there was a lot of good stuff announced and shared during the conference.

Check out the main keynote here: Microsoft Inspire Keynote

Any also the rest of the sessions: Session catalog (microsoft.com)

Categories
Intune

Intune Suite – What’s in it for me?

Microsoft finally released the long-awaited Intune Suite, or as it is called in Intune “add-ons”.

But what is the Intune Suite and why should I even care? That’s what I’m set out to cover in this blog post, and we will take a look at what there is right now and what’s to come.

One major change happened when this was introduced, and that is how Intune is licensed. Or at least it got some new names. Microsoft Intune Plan 1 is what previously was just called Intune and is included in the Microsoft 365 and EMS plans. This will give you the core Intune features as you have been using them today (with some exceptions).

Then we have Microsoft Intune Plan 2 which are some add-ons to plan 1 including Microsoft Intune Tunnel for Mobile Application Management, which will give you an option to use Intune Tunnel together with your MAM enabled applications. And then we also have Microsoft Intune management of specialty devices, which enables you to manage specialty devices in Intune such as AR/VR devices, conference room meeting devices and large smart screen devices.

For Plan 1, there is also a possibility to buy Remote Help, Endpoint Privilege Management, Advanced Endpoint Analtics and the other upcoming features as standalone services to your Plan 1.

Intune Suite – premium features for Intune

The Intune Suite is a packaged deal which includes all the bells and whistles. You get Plan 1 and Plan 2, but also all the nice extra add-ons. Today, this list is quite limited since it will only get you Plan 2, MS Intune Tunnel for MAM and Remote Help on-top of your Plan 1 licens (which you got from your M365 license anyway). BUT, and this is the selling point, you will get all the upcoming features once they are released.

The two already released premium features (if we disregard the Plan 2 features), are by them self really good products. I’ve previously covered the Remote Help app which since then has been refined even further.

Microsoft has further announced that they will release Endpoint Privilege Management (which is currently in public preview) and Advanced Endpoint Analytics as a start, but there are more things coming which will make this suite even better!

Why should I consider this?

Should you consider the Microsoft Intune suite? Well, that depends on your needs. For some, it certanly makes sense to consider it given that they are interested in a lot of the listed features. For others, maybe just one is interesting which then makes more sense to buy as add-ons on it’s on rather than buying the whole suite.

I think, as of right now, Remote Help and the upcoming Endpoint Privilege Management is what will be most useful for many companies as it solves two major headaches: A remote support tool integrated to Intune and a first party solution to manage local administrator. There are a lot of other good tools out there to manage both remote support and local administrator but having a first party tool comes with advantages such as good integrations to Intune for e.g. reporting.

I will in feature post dig in more to the features of the Intune Suite, but for now we have set the scene!

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Can we build a Windows 365 kiosk for shared use?

Once every now and then you get one of those weird and maybe a bad ideas and ask yourself:

What if I have a Windows 10 computer which cannot run Windows 11, but I really want to run Windows 11 on it in a supported way?

That was what I asked myself when realizing my old Surface Laptop (first generation) does not support Windows 11.

Putting this in maybe a more real-life like scenario “we have some old hardware and Windows 365. We want to keep using the hardware for a few more years but run Windows 11” or something like that.

This gave me an idea. Can we create a kiosk that runs the Windows 365 app only on a managed Windows 10 computer? And to make it more special, let’s make it as a shared device so that I get MY Cloud PC and you get YOUR Cloud PC! 😊

Since Windows 365 Boot is not coming to Windows 10, we need another solution. This solution could be using kiosk mode and shared mode for Windows.

Pre-reqs

What do we need for this to work?

  • Intune managed Windows 10 computer
  • Computer registered for Windows Autopilot
  • Self-deploying deployment profile for Windows Autopilot
  • Shared device policy
  • Windows 365 license of some sort
  • All other licenses required to use Intune
  • The Remote Desktop application installed on a device
  • An Azure AD group containing out kiosk PCs

And that is about it.

My thought is to use the old school ShellLauncher method for this, not the fancy assigned app setup since we can make this more dynamic if we want to re-purpose this for another application. This means that we could also use Win32 applications and not only UWP apps.

Using the ShellLauncher method in Intune has gotten really easy, it’s just one custom policy and we are set.

Creating the ShellLauncher script

When looking around for a good source, and inspiration, for this setup I came across this post by Michael Niehaus which is really good and even provides a sample script we can use (why re-invent the wheel?).

Using the script example in the blog above, I came up with this script which you can download from my Github repo.

Basically, what you need to update, is the <Shell> section of this part to the path for your application (Win32) or the AUMID (UWP). In this case, the Windows 365 app for Windows 10 which is a UWP app (as stated in the V2:AppType attribute).

If the remote desktop session is closed, the application will restart.

Creating the ShellLauncher policy

For this, we need to create a custom policy in Intune.

First step is to go to Intune (https://endpoint.microsoft.com) and navigate to Devices > Windows > Configuration profiles and select “+ Create profile“. Select Windows 10 and later as platform, Template as profile type and then the Custom template.

Next, we will give our profile a good name so that we know what the profile does. This should be based on your name standard and naming convention for policies. Then hit next at the bottom of the window.

On the “Configuration settings” tab, select “Add” and give the configuration a name (e.g., ShellLauncher V2). As OMA-URI, enter:

./Device/Vendor/MSFT/AssignedAccess/ShellLauncher 

As data type, select “String (XML file)” and upload your XML file. When this is completed, press Save at the bottom of the screen.

You will now see that your setting has been added as a row to this configuration setting and you can press Next at the bottom of the screen.

On the Assignment tab, select the group where you have put you targeted kiosk devices and press Next at the bottom of the screen.

You can skip the “Applicability rules” tab and jump straight to the “Review + create” tab to view a summary of your configuration.

Once you have reviewed your settings, you can press Create and your profile will be created.

Shared device policy

The other profile we need to create is a profile for Shared device. This is done by going to Devices > Windows > Configuration profiles and select “+ Create profile“. Select “Windows 10 and later” as platform, “Templates” as Profile type and find and select “Shared multi-user device” and click create.

Give your profile a name, I will call mine “Win365 Shared Kiosk“. When you have given your profile a name, press next.

On the Configuration settings tab, enable the Shared PC mode and add the settings you need based on your requirements. I will use Domain as Guest account type to ensure that only users from my organization will be allowed to sign in. I will also add some additional settings as you can see from the screen. When you have added your settings, hit next.

Assign your policy to the group you created and used for the ShellLauncher policy and press next.

On the last step, review your settings and click create!

Self-deploying enrollment profile

To have this as a zero-touch installation, which would require zero input from an IT person, we can use the self-deploying deployment profile in Windows Autopilot, which means that we need to create a new profile.

In Intune, head to Devices > Windows > Windows Enrollment > Deployment profiles and select “+ Create profile” and select Windows PC.

First step is as always to give you profile a name, I will call mine “Self deployed Kiosk” and then press next.

On the next tab, select “Self-Deploying (preview)” as Deployment mode. You will then see that almost all fields are grayed out. You can leave all values as default, or choose to change the Language, if keyboard should be automatically configured and if a name template should be used.

Notice: If you are to use this on a virtual machine, you will need to use the user-driver deployment mode since self-deploying requires physical hardware.

For this demo, I will leave everything set to default and press next.

The next step is to set assignments, we will select the Azure AD group we created for the policy for this, but you could also use another group. The important part is that the device is in this group.

Press next and you will end up on the review + create tab where you can review your settings before pressing create.

Once the profile is created, it will take around 15 minutes or so for the enrollment profile to be applied to your device, given that it’s not already included in another active assignment. If that is the case, you need to either add an exclusion group or remove it from the other group before the profile will be assigned.

If you navigate to Devices > Windows > Windows Enrollment > Devices you can look at your device and make sure the correct enrollment profile is assigned.

Deploying our kiosk

This is where the fun begins. Let’s deploy our kiosk to our device!

My device needed to be reset, since it’s already managed by Intune, I can simply just use the wipe command and the device will reset. Since I’ve already added it to the target group for my deployment profile, the enrollment will kick off automatically once the device has been reset. However, if you are connecting using Wi-Fi, you will need to select region, keyboard and Wi-Fi network.

Once the Windows Autopilot enrollment process has completed, my Windows 365 kiosk device is ready, and I can now only run the Windows 365 app on my device.

NOTICE!

There is a big flaw in this design at the moment, and that is the fact that we cannot deploy the W365 application during the ESP at this stage, this means that we need to ensure that the application is installed BEFORE we apply the kiosk profile. If and when we can install the application from the “new store” during ESP, this will not be an issue.

This means that we currently need to wait until the W365 app has been deployed before we assign our kiosk profile.

Additional reading:

Awesome post by a fellow W365 MVP Dominiek: Windows 11 Kiosk With The Windows 365 App – techlab.blog

Post by Michael Niehaus how to create a kiosk using ShellLauncher: Creating a kiosk or digital sign using Windows Autopilot, Intune, and Edge (Chromium) – Out of Office Hours (oofhours.com)

Categories
Intune

The Windows 365 app

Okay let’s face it. The Windows 365 app is just ONE more app to consume our Windows 365 or Cloud PC. But it brings something to the table.

With the Remote Desktop app that we have all learned to connect to our Cloud PCs, AVDs or published apps. And it’s a great app, especially if you work as a consultant like I do and have multiple environments that you connect to, I connect to 2-3 different tenants on a weekly basis. But the Remote Desktop lacks key features when it comes to Windows 365.

If you have ever used Windows 365 through the browser, you know what I’m talking about. There is NO WAY to reboot, restore or troubleshoot a Cloud PC from within the Remote Desktop app, you can simply just connect to your session, and for anymore “advanced” user action you have had to rely on the browser.

Enter the Windows 365 application.

In the Windows 365 app you are able, as in the Remote Desktop app, to connect to your Cloud PCs which are connected to your signed in account. This is the caveat though. Only machines available for the signed in account are displayed, if you are running multiple accounts (like I do) you will have to switch accounts.

However, the features in the Windows 365 app make it worth it, since I can fully control my Cloud PC from within the app, and I don’t have to rely on the website to perform addition actions like I needed previously.

If you have ever used the Windows 365 website to connect to your Cloud PC, you will recognize this experience. The layout is familiar to the web, but you get all the benefits of using the app (like multiple monitors, smart sizing, and Teams optimizations), but you also get the user actions previously exclusive to the web portal.

Working with the Windows 365 app compared to the Remote Desktop app is for me as an end-user not really any different, other the account part mentioned earlier. But if you only use one account, like most are, you will never notice this difference.

You should really check out the new Windows 365 app which is in preview. You can find it on this link or if you search the Microsoft Store for Windows 365. But like always with preview things, be aware that it’s in preview!

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Ignite 2022 – live in Seattle!

So, 2022 was the year Microsoft Ignite was FINALLY a physical event again, and for the first time on Microsoft home turf in Seattle.

Being an ex-Microsoft FTE, this gave me major flashbacks to TechReady, which was an internal training event Microsoft used to host in Seattle. Same location as Ignite, just no hilarious videos with Norm Judah encouraging everyone to fill out the evaluations.

Ignite was different this year since it’s a hybrid event, and the first big such for Microsoft which means that they are still trying out the concept.

Overall, I had a lot of fun. For me, meeting up with peers and having the time to focus on the content is important, if sessions are digital or physical doesn’t really matter. Some sessions made more sense virtually. But in-person sessions are usually the best, and you could really tell that people wanted this. Especially the big keynotes are always more fun in-person.

But I was missing the expo where you can meet vendors or just mingle with Microsoft people, there wasn’t really any space for this, except for an awesome Surface expo.

However, the width that the “old” Ignite had was missing and the break-down sessions were missing. The feeling was that this hybrid thing was more focused on people attending remote, and people on site were more the live audience.

There was a lot of news and I’ve picked out the ones I found most interesting.

Windows

Just before Ignite kicked off, there was a Surface event where some news around Windows 11 was released. Check it out here:

Introducing new Surface devices that take the Windows PC into the next era of computing | Microsoft Devices Blog

If you want to read more about all the Windows 365 news, check this out: What’s new in Windows 365: Microsoft Ignite 2022 edition – Microsoft Community Hub

Microsoft 365 and Windows 365 in the Metaverse

This was released a few days prior to Microsoft Ignite, but Microsoft 365 and Windows 365 will be supported on Meta Quest devices, providing a new kind of experience for productivity in the Metaverse.

This means that you will be able to run a fully supported productivity setup in the Metaverse with e.g., Microsoft Teams and Windows 365. Windows 365 is not yet released for Metaverse, but this indicates strongly which direction VR is heading now.

On top of Microsoft 365 apps being supported, you will also be able to manage the Meta Quest and Meta Quest 2 using Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Intune, which would provide IT admins with a whole new option of what a PC or workstation is for their end-users. You can read more on this blogpost by Microsoft: Microsoft and Meta partner to deliver immersive experiences for the future of work and play – The Official Microsoft Blog

The new Windows 365 app (preview)

The Remote Desktop app has for long been the go-to application for your VDIs, but now for Windows 365 you can use the brand-new Windows 365 app which is now in public preview. This app aligns more with the Windows 365 features found on the web portal but with the advantages of the desktop app! Read more here:

Experience the Windows 365 app: public preview available now – Microsoft Community Hub

Organizational messages

Getting messages out to end-users is always a struggle within IT. There is a new feature for Windows 11 where you can send organizational messages, natively in Windows, to your users instead of sending them email using Microsoft Intune coming in November to Windows 11 22h2. Read more here:

Deliver organizational messages with Windows 11 and Microsoft Intune – Microsoft Community Hub

Microsoft Intune

No more MEM…

The brand Microsoft Endpoint Manager or MEM is going away. The new product-family name will be Microsoft Intune where a bunch of things will be included, Configuration Manager amongst others. You can read more about the anoncment here:

Introducing the Microsoft Intune product family – Microsoft Community Hub

Add-ons for Microsoft Intune

Add-ons for Microsoft Intune is obviously here to stay, and it’s also growing bigger than just Remote Help which has been an add-on for a while now.

Out of the list of new add-ons coming, what caught my eye especially was these two which I think will solve a lot of headaches for a lot of IT admins.

You can read more here about all new add-ons:

Reduce your overall TCO with a new Microsoft Intune plan – Microsoft Community Hub

Endpoint privilege management in preview

Enabling local admin for users on a temporary basis has been a struggle with Intune managed devices. Old solutions relying on attributes in the on-premises AD do not work and there aren’t really any “best practices” established around this yet.

However, Microsoft is looking to solve this with the Endpoint Privilege Management which is in public preview. Read more in the link above.

Automated app patching as add-on

Keeping applications up to date is something that many stuggles with, and there are products around to solve that. Now Microsoft are throwing themselves into this game as well, which makes a lot of sense. This is just briefly mentioned in the “Further value and looking forward” part of the article, but if they are able to deliver on a native Microsoft Intune feature for this, that would simplify things a lot!

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!