Getting Started with Microsoft Intune

Microsoft Intune is the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for unified endpoint management (UEM) and is an excellent tool for managing your end user devices, especially in the modern hybrid workforce. This book is your comprehensive guide to getting you started with using and configuring Microsoft Intune with only a basic understanding of end user compute management and PowerShell (for automation and scripting).

Intune is a cloud management software service that can fully manage your entire end user computing estate wherever you are. This includes Windows, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Android, and Linux for both corporate and personally owned devices, as well as cloud computing with Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop.

You can secure corporate data on any device, and Intune follows the zero-trust security model. As well as compliance and policy management, Intune will also handle your application deployment across devices.

Before digging into the finer points of using the platform, first, we need to look at the prerequisites and have a general look at Entra ID (previously Azure AD; you may find references to both in documentation and blog posts). While Microsoft Intune is part of the Microsoft 365 suite, it relies on Entra ID for groups, users, conditional access policies, and more, so an understanding of how these work will make your life significantly easier. In this chapter, we will look at how we can leverage Microsoft Entra to set the foundations for a successful Intune deployment.

This chapter will include the following recipes:

• Creating a tenant
• Creating a user
• Assigning Entra ID roles
• Configuring Entra ID Device settings
• Configuring Entra ID ESR
• Creating Entra ID static groups
• Creating Entra ID dynamic groups
• Configuring Entra ID MDM/MAM scopes