Verifying installed applications as part of the compliance of Windows devices

This week is focused on the installed applications on Windows devices. More specifically, this week is focused on making sure that Windows devices are compliant with a list of unapproved apps. There are many methods for making sure that users won’t or can’t install specific apps on their Windows device. That could be by simply making sure that users don’t have the permissions to install apps and lock down their Windows devices, but that could also be by verifying the installed apps on their Windows devices. This post will focus on the latter, by comparing the installed apps with a list of unapproved apps. That can be achieved by using custom compliance settings. A few months ago I wrote about working with custom compliance settings. That …

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Working with custom compliance settings

This week is all about the latest capabilities that are available within compliance policies. Those capabilities are custom compliance settings. Custom compliance settings enable the IT administrator to basically check for anything and to use that for the compliance state of the device. The IT administrator can use PowerShell script in the custom compliance setting, to verify the status of anything that is available on the device. The results can be compared to rules and values that are configured in a JSON file. The result of that comparision can be used as part of the compliance policy. This post will proivde a quick introduction to custom compliance settings, followed with the steps to create the require PowerShell script and JSON file. This post will end …

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Alternatives for querying and visualizing Update Compliance data

This week is follow-up on the post of last week about enhancing Update Compliance with a custom Workbook in Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center. There were multiple questions on that post regarding alternatives for querying and visualizing the Update Compliance data. The good news is that there are actually multiple alternatives for querying Update Compliance data, but, in all fairness, all the alternatives rely on the same API. The Azure Log Analytics REST API. That API can be called by specifying the workspace, providing a token and running the required query. Pretty straight forward. Also, that API is an important part of most other methods that are used for querying Update Compliance data. This post will provide a quick introduction to the Azure Log Analytics …

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Enhance inventory reporting with local administrator information

This week is all about enhancing inventory reporting with information about the local administrators on the managed Windows 10 devices. This time is not about managing the different local administrators on those Windows 10 devices, but this time is about creating a report that provides insights to the different local administrators that are configured on those Windows 10 devices. The solution to enhance the inventory reporting, relies on PowerShell, Log analytics, Workbooks and the Azure Monitor HTTP Data Collector API. PowerShell is used to gather the information on the local device and uses the Azure Monitor HTTP Data Collector API to write the gathered information to Log analytics. Workbooks are used to visualize the gathered data from Log analytics. This solution is inspired and based …

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Remediating local administrators with proactive remediations

Like last week, this week is all about proactive remediations, a feature of Endpoint Analytics. As mentioned last week, proactive remediations are script packages that can detect common issues and remediate those issues if needed. All of that before the user even realizes that there is an issue. Those remediations can help with reducing support calls. The strength is that the remediations can be anything to address potential issues, as long as it can be addressed by using PowerShell. Each script package contains a detection script and a remediation script and that script package is deployed through Microsoft Intune. For deploying script packages, Microsoft Intune relies on the Intune Management Extension (IME). To show the real power of proactive remediations, I’ll further develop the local …

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Detecting local administrators with proactive remediations

This week is all about proactive remediations, which is a feature of Endpoint Analytics. Proactive remediations are script packages that can detect common issues and remediate those issues if needed. All of that before the user even realizes that there is an issue. Those remediations can help with reducing support calls. The strength is that the remediations can be anything to address potential issues, as long as it can be addressed by using PowerShell. Each script package contains a detection script and a remediation script and that script package is deployed through Microsoft Intune. For deploying script packages, Microsoft Intune relies on the Intune Management Extension (IME). To show the power of proactive remediations, I’ll use local administrators as an example. I’ve did something similar …

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Configuring the OneDrive sync app basics for Windows devices

This week is all about configuring the OneDrive sync app basics for Windows devices. The main component for accessing OneDrive for Business content on Windows devices, is the OneDrive sync app. By default the OneDrive sync app is available on Windows devices and installed per user. In this post I’ll have a look at the installation of the OneDrive sync app and the basic configuration that I think that should be applied to get the best user experience. All by using Microsoft Intune for managing the Windows devices. I’ll end this post by having a quick look at the configuration on the Windows device. OneDrive sync app installation The first thing that should be addressed is the installation of the OneDrive sync app. By default, …

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Simplifying the migration of Android device administrator to Android Enterprise work profile management

This week is all about a recently introduced feature that will help organizations with their move away from Android device administrator managed devices to Android Enterprise work profile management. That is a very welcome feature as Google is decreasing device administrator support in new Android releases, which makes difficult for Microsoft Intune (and any other MDM-solution) to adequately manage Android device administrator managed devices starting with Android 10. The feature in Microsoft Intune that will help with moving away from Android device administrator managed devices is a compliance setting that will enable organizations to block devices in a structured manner and to provide a direct migration path to Android Enterprise work profile management. In this post I’ll show how to create and configure a device …

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Changing the primary user of Windows devices

This week is all about the primary user of a Windows device. More specifically about the recently introduced functionality to change or remove the primary user of a Windows device. The primary user is used within Microsoft Intune to map a licensed user to a device. Changing the primary user enables the administrator to switch the primary user of a device from one user to another user, or to switch a device without an assigned primary user (shared device) to a specific user. Besides that, removing the primary user enables the administrator to switch a device from a specific user to a shared device. In this post I’ll start with a short introduction about the primary user (and shared devices), followed by actually changing the …

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Using bulk actions for renaming Windows devices

A few months ago, I did a blog post about the different ways of renaming Windows 10 devices. This week is a follow-up on that post, as it will also be about renaming Windows devices. This time it’s about using the recently introduced functionality to perform Bulk actions on devices. Those Bulk actions include the action to rename Windows 10 devices in bulk. That Bulk action is also available as a single action on a device and is currently not available for hybrid Azure Active Directory joined devices, nor available for co-managed devices. In this post I’ll show how to perform this action by using the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center, followed by using the Microsoft Graph Explorer. I’ll end this post by showing an …

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