Month: April 2024

Getting started with Personal Data Encryption

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This week is all about a nice feature that has been introduced over a year ago, but that didn’t receive a lot of attention yet. That feature is Personal Data Encryption (PDE). PDE was introduced with Windows 11, version 22H2, as a security feature that provides file-based data encryption functionalities to Windows. Not as an alternative to BitLocker, but to work alongside BitLocker. Were the decryption key of BitLocker is released during the boot of the device, the decryption key of PDE is released during the sign-in of the user by using Windows Hello for Business. That makes sure that PDE is basically an additional layer of security, on top of BitLocker, that can focus on providing an additional layer of security for specific apps …

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Why enrolling personal Windows devices might be a really bad idea

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This week is basically a brief follow-up on one of my sessions at the Modern Endpoint Management Summit 2024. More specifically, my session about Protecting corporate data on personal Windows devices – Your options. During that session I went into a bit more detail about the discussion that I started earlier on Twitter/X around enrolling personal Windows devices. My opinion around that might be lightly biased from what I’ve seen over the years, but I do think that I can provide some insights into why I think that it’s not a good idea to enroll personal Windows devices. In this blog post, I’ll provide a short summary of what I’ve shared during my session. It’s good to have an opinion, but it’s even better to …

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Quick tip: Only turn off notifications network usage when there is a direct requirement

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This week is a relatively short post, mainly focused on providing a warning around turning off notifications network usage on Windows devices. Turning off notifications network usage can be used to prevent applications from using the notifications network the send notifications. No matter if that notification is a tile update, tile badge, toast, or any raw updates. It basically turns off the connection between Windows and the Windows Push Notification Services (WNS). WNS enables third-party developers to send those notifications. It provides a mechanism to deliver updates to users and devices in a power-efficient and dependable way. The important thing, however, is to keep in mind that WNS is not only used by third-party developers. It’s also used by many different Microsoft products, including Microsoft …

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Troubleshooting MAM for Windows

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This week is a short follow-up on a post of a few months ago about getting started with Mobile Application Management (MAM) for Windows. That post was really focused on getting started with MAM for Windows, while this post will be more focused on what’s coming after that. The concept and the basic configuration of MAM for Windows is pretty straight forward, once being familiar with the available configuration options. However, it gets more challenging when verifying the configuration and the behavior. Especially when there is not that much information available. The (location of the) log file is not really well documented, as is the process to verify the applied configuration. This post will provide answers to those questions. It will described were to find …

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Looking closer at enabling Endpoint analytics

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This week is all about Endpoint analytics and indirectly Advanced Analytics. More specifically, about enabling Endpoint Analytics and what happens after enabling Endpoint analytics. The process of enabling Endpoint analytics is not that special and can only be performed once per tenant. It is, however, good to be familiar with what happens after enabling Endpoint analytics. To understand the settings that become available and the impact of adjusting those settings. Especially the impact for the Windows devices within the environment. Besides that, it’s also important to be familiar with configurations that are not directly part of Endpoint analytics, but that do influence the results provided by Endpoint analytics. This post will focus on exactly those subjects! This post will provide an overview of what enabling …

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