Intune

Recap on a great Configuration Manager Community Event (#CMCE1710) in Zurich

Yesterday the CMCE1710 event took place in Zurich, hosted by Mirko. It was a great community event with huge community power and great technical content delivered by the EM&S MVPs Roger Zander, Ronny de Jong and Mirko Colemberg.

Why I do the recap?

With this short blog post, I would like to call more attention on events like that! Specially for people in the Workplace Engineering and Office365 business. If you attend CMCE or other similar great Events, you will get a lot of information about new technologies, best practices. Having a chance to place your questions directly during the sessions to the experts about your current issues or opportunities. A similar Event in Switzerland is the Experts Live Café held in Bern.

What was the content?

First, the content was great! My first session attending, I gave Matrix42 another chance to satisfy me about their Enterprise Manager (EM). The EM is not a tool that replaces ConfigMgr, this was very important to David König – Chef Program Manager of the EM. The tool should help you to easy manage complicated tasks in ConfigMgr. Specially with Reports, Role Based Access and Rollout Plans. Matrix42 made a great effort with the new End-User Agent based on a Chrome Engine. This is how ConfigMgr should notify users in a modern way.

2017-10-19 10_26_19-IMG_20171018_085553.jpg ‎- Photos.gif

After a break, I was attending the Session from Ronny de Jong, MVP EM&S. As always, great content delivered here! Ronny was talking about all the possibilities of ConfigMgr and Cloud Services. ConfigMgr has currently nine direct connections to Azure based Applications. One topic he talked about, was the ConfigMgr Cloud Management Gateway(CMG). In my point of view, each customer with Mobile Users – doesn’t matter if they use a Laptop, Surface Book or Tablets – should use a Cloud Management Gateway. The Setup is much easier than the old way to get Internet based clients attached to your ConfigMgr Hierarchy. You don’t need any servers in your DMZ (you need an Azure Subscription instead) and the certificate handling is much more easier. If you not have looked at the CMG, do it now!

2017-10-19 10_18_34-IMG_20171018_101701.jpg ‎- Photos — Ronny in Action!

The whole afternoon was just great, with real stuff and information delivered by David James (Director of Engineering ConfigMgr Microsoft Redmond), also known on Twitter as @djammmer.

David presented his personal IT career during the last years, specially at Microsoft and how the product changed from SMS to ConfigMgr. A really great story with a lot of great people working on that product. He took questions by the beginning and answers directly during the whole afternoon. Some topics where Telemetry Data, Co-Management with Intune, a REST-API currently in TP, Cloud Management Gateway and Client Health. I’m not able to cover everything here because this should be a short recap. But one of my favorite question from David to the audience was: “Do you think ConfigMgr is dead? Then raise your hand(s)”. Not one hand was raised!

David explained how many times SCCM was declared as dead but the history says something different!

: Full house at CMCE1710

For me, it was a great honor to meet David personally, the director of the tool I mostly have in front of me: System Center Configuration Manager #ConfigMgr #SCCM. Thanks for being here!

: From the right: Martin Wüthrich, itnetX – Jakob Filipovsky, itnetX, David James, Microsoft – Roger Zander, itnetX, Alain Schneiter, itnetX

Thanks to Mirko for the great Event!

Microsoft Intune: Enable remote control for Android Devices using the TeamViewer connector

Today I played around with my Android device and Intune using the remote control option in Intune. The initial reason was, that my sister was calling me yesterday to help her out with her new Huawei Android phone. She tried to configure her Office365 account and was not able to do so. Of course, I helped her, but using remote control on the phone would be much cooler :-).

So I logged in to the Azure Portal, went to “Intune” and under Devices I found the Option “Setup” TeamViewer Connector.

Before you can use TeamViewer to remote control your devices, you have to create an account or use an existing one to authorize Intune with TeamViewer. Go through the sign-in page from TeamViewer and authorize Intune. Make sure that the Connection Status in the portal is set to “Active”.

Don’t miss the message in the connector:
“The TeamViewer service allows users of Intune-managed Android devices to get remote assistance from their IT administrator. Create TeamViewer sessions by first associating Intune with your TeamViewer account and then authorizing it to work with Intune. If you don’t yet have a TeamViewer account you will need to create one. “

After that, It would probably make sense to deploy the Andoird TeamVewer Quick Support app to all Android Devices from your Company. This can be done by creating an app in the portal an assign it to the devices. This is not covered in this blog post.

How can you now initiate a remote session?

On your Windows 10 Desktop machine download and install (or just run) the latest version of TeamViewer. In my case it is TV 12. After that, sign-in to the application with the user account you created earlier in the post:

Go to the Intune Portal, select the device you like to remote control, go to Overview and there on the upper right hand you will find the three-dot option “…More”. Select “New Remote Assistance Session”.

This will initiate a new session to your Android Device. Click “Yes”.

The user will have to go to the Company Portal and accept the request. The request is displayed in the notifications area of the Company Portal App.

TeamViewer Desktop creates a new category for you called “Intune” with all your remote control requests out from Intune. Just double click the invitation you recieved and from there you’re able to remote control the users device.

Be aware that the user will need to accept and confirm the session again. Now you can remote Control the Android device out from your TeamViewer Software. Very cool.

A great and nice option which should be used for remote supporting your android devices!

First look at the new #OneDrive Admin Center (Preview)

The new OneDrive Admin Center Preview is now available since a few days. During the past it was just a pain in the a** for admins to manage the OneDrive for Business settings. This has pretty changed a with the new portal which is not yet GA.

If your tenant already has been upgraded then you will be able to access your portal with a Global Admin account using the URL https://admin.onedrive.com

Let’s have a look on the settings.

Home Tab
The home tabs shows just the welcome message.

Sharing Tab
On the sharing tab you find all the settings for sharing files outside of your organization. Let them share files outside the company using OneDrive or SharePoint, setting up sharing links, anonymous accces, limiting sharing to a sepzific domainand also what external users can do.

Sync
The sync tab allows the admin to have control over the syncing settings. Also you have a link for downloading always the latest and newest OneDrive Client and another link to the support.office.com website to see the latest syncing issues.

Following options can be configured:

let users install the sync client from the OneDrive website
Allow syncing onlx PCs joined to specific domain
- Enter a GUID for your domain(s)
Block syncing of specific file types
- Enter file extentions you don’t want. For example mp3

Storage
Use the storage tab to configure the limits of the users storage. Default OneDrive value is 1024 MB. In here you can also set the retention time for accounts that have been marked as deleted.

Device Access
These settings applies to OneDrive an SharePoint.

Control Access based on a network location
- Enter here your IP addresses or ranges for access to OneDrive. IPv4 & IPv6 is supported.
Mobile Application Management trough Intune is supported. You need an Intune license to use this option.

After assigning an Intune license to your GA Account you will be able to modify the settings for device management. This is an disadvantage in my point of view. It should be possible to change settings as admin without having any licenses applied.

Compliance
A few regulatory, legal and technical standards for OneDrive can be set here. This part helps to protect your data and preform security standard settings.

Auditing
- View users activities related to OneDrive – deleted, shared, moved files
- DLP – Data loss prevention, protect your organizations sensitive data
- Configure retention policies
- eDiscovery for emails, documents an Skype for Business conversations
- Alerting, user and admin logs will be created

Note also the title of the page which gives you a hint to the Security and Compliance Center of Office 365.

I’m pretty sure that the new portal will be integrated into the Office 365 Admin Center. Until then, the admin portal is a good way to manage your OneDrive settings. Try it out today.