Windows Intune

Hello again! I'm skipping the keynote write up until tonight as I have skipped lunch to do some quick updates. I love my audience that much! To show you appreciate it, add some comments or tick the rating boxes!

After being launched on Monday as a beta (admittedly Beta3), Windows Intune has already closed to new participants, what they thought would take a week, filled up in matter of hours, so you can see people are pretty excited.

Reminder of what it is - desktop management via a cloud service. Why MS think it is needed:

1. Many customers struggle with non standard, multi version environments.
2. Workers are in many locations
3. Lack of insight into PC estate
4. Cannot afford a huge infrastructure investment

By using Windows Intune you can avoid the above and deliver many additional features that small companies typically couldn't or don't do. Such as:

1. Protect PCs from Malware
2. Standardise on a version of Windows
3. Upgrade to Win7 or downgrade to run a version of choice
4. Automatic upgrades to new versions of the service
5. Diagnostics and recovery toolset (which can recover even a non bootable PC)
6. Access to all MDOP functionality (this is a great feature)
7. Bitlocker to go (another great feature)
8. No infrastructure required (so no hardware/OS/license costs or power etc)
9. Predictable monthly billing

Signing up is via the MS Business Online services website, and you get access to the Cloud based admin console. From here you use a simple wizard to do some customisations and configuration which gets saved as a .MSI - this can then be installed on your pc estate and voila - you are managing you estate via the cloud!

I can see a niche use for Mars - Royal Canin currently have a series of startup companies whilst the enter a new market - each company has to manage its own IT - this would be a great solution to at least ensure they were patched, had anti virus, were licence compliant and so on. It can even manage non Domain joined machines the same as you would configure your traditional estate - this would ensure a consistent look and feel and user experience one the startup joins the Mars network fully.

The admin interface was very intuitive, and very immediate - I was impressed with this being a beta product. There is context sensitive help so someone with basic IT skills should be able to manage the PCs via this platform - again great for small companies where the focus is on the business not managing the IT. The PC agent even has some self healing built in to make it as simple as possible to remediate.

You can do things like export the hw or software inventories - great for Commercial to check compliance.

It does include basic remote control but the user has to make a request. Further versions will see this expanded.

Whilst it is only for client machines now, I did notice it had some server things listed so it may well be on the roadmap ;-) Another thing on the roadmap is software distribution - again this would be superb functionality to add.

Release should be within 12 months to NA/EU/Asia and Brasil

If you want to track the progress, the team at MS have a blog here