Windows Intune beta Now Available

You spoke and we listened! Thanks to all the great feedback we received during the Windows Intune beta last year and its subsequent commercial release, we have been hard at work and new features and enhancements to the Windows Intune service. We received input on how well the service worked for you, what you’d like to see in future releases, and we are now excited to announce that we have a new Windows Intune beta release available. Effective immediately, you can go to Windows Intune Springboard site for information on signing up for your beta subscription. Once you have completed the sign-up process and activated your account, you can go to https://beta.manage.microsoft.com to begin evaluating the beta. A beta subscription will allow you to deploy to up to 10 PCs, which should allow you to evaluate the improvements we’ve made.

Here are the highlights of what’s new:

Software Distribution

• Package applications, upload them to the cloud for distribution, and deploy them to your Windows Intune-managed PCs.  For the beta we have provided 2 gigs of storage for this purpose. Packages can be normal applications in the form of MSIs or EXEs or third party updates. Deploying packages leverages BITS to ensure data transfer is efficient.

Better Hardware Reporting and Filters

• We do a great job of collecting hardware data, but we want to ensure we also present this information in a way that is most useful to you. To assist with this, we have introduced the hardware dashboard along with reports, which will help you view and export your hardware more easily.

Third Party License Management

• Upload and track your 3rd party and Microsoft retail or OEM license agreements - in addition to Microsoft Volume License Agreements – all in one place.

User Interface Enhancements

• Many new enhancements have been made to the user experience. In general, we made numerous changes to improve navigability. We are also introducing the ability to right-click, which will display a list of context-sensitive actions you can perform. We have also added a new administrator role, so you can now have ‘read-only’ administrators.

Remote Actions

• Execute a number of tasks on remote unattended PCs. You can invoke malware definitions to install, you can initiate a malware scan to run immediately, and you can remotely reboot a PC.

Improvements to Alerts Workspace

• We’ve introduced the ability to configure thresholds on alerts so you can filter out less important events, and focus on the ones that matter to you. We also improved the way you set up recipients for these alerts.

Support for images

• The Windows Intune client is ‘image-friendly’ and can be set up prior to image deployment. Previously, the Windows Intune client required an internet connection before it could install.

Remember, this is all about hearing what you think. We have several ways for you to provide feedback, the main ones are:

• Beta Forum. Visit our forum to post questions, participate in discussions, and find answers to commonly asked questions. Our forums are moderated by the Windows Intune engineering team, so this is a great source of accurate information.
• Feedback form: If you have specific feedback to share about your experiences with Windows Intune, we urge you to submit it here. Due to the quantity of feedback we receive, we can’t respond to everyone, but be assured we review everything that is submitted. This is how you can influence the direction we take with Windows Intune, and help us make it a great service that helps you solve your IT management challenges. Please, if possible enter only one feedback item per submission (you can enter as many submissions as you like).

You’ll also find a wealth of information in our online help, here.  In coming weeks, we’ll be posting blog entries which dive deeper into each of the new features mentioned above, so stay tuned!