Microsoft’s Intune product is not something that I have blogged much about, in fact this is the first blog I’ve ever written on the product. But that’s all about to change….
Microsoft Intune was originally designed as an online “Lite” version of System Center Configuration Manager for those smaller organisations with a very mobile workforce. It was very slow to gain much momentum as many organizations already has System Center Configuration Manager and could not see the value for the product.
Over the years Microsoft have slowly but surely moved focus of the Intune product to a more Mobile Device Management focus and even started to integrate in a “Hybrid” method in to System Center Configuration Manager. (More on this in later blog posts)
In late October this year (26th October 2016 to be precise) the Enterprise Mobility and Security team announced a new Troubleshooting Portal for the Azure platform.
This new troubleshooting portal provides analysts with a range of critical data exactly when and where they need it to resolve issues for end users who may be experiencing issues with their Intune connected mobile devices.
As the Microsoft Intune Team says in their announcement blog post:
Having the right data at your fingertips is a must when you’re troubleshooting issues with your end users. Intune’s new Troubleshooting Portal provides a “single pane of glass” for reviewing device status, assignments and policies affecting a user, eliminating the need to click into multiple workloads to diagnose issues.
…..this is a big win for IT Pros and Support or Helpdesk workers who want resolve end user issues faster with less effort.
The user details that an analyst can view for each user are:
- User status
- Group assignment
- Application and policy assignments
- App protection status
- Compliance issues
- Device status
and - Device details (Such as OS type and version)
But I don’t want to give my Helpdesk staff access to my Intune environment!
No worries there.
Intune’s inbuilt Role Based Access Control (RBAC) solution allows for admins to grant access to support and helpdesk staff to just the items that they require and nothing else. The inbuilt Helpdesk Operator role grants members access to end users assignments, policies devices apps etc. and even see if their devices are registered in AD and in the future you will even be able to see applications installation status and enrollment status of devices.
Getting access to this level of information on the helpdesk at the time of a users call to the service desk is very powerful to assist staff in resolving any issues at first contact and getting your end users back to fully functional work as soon as possible.
If only Configuration Manager had a nice friendly website that we could give easy RBAC access to for Helpdesk and Support staff to get basic troubleshooting information without them needing the console or giving away the keys to the ConfigMgr kingdom…… Oh wait…. I’m sure I’ve blogged about that before….. 🙂