When you bring on a new hire does your IT team spend time having to configure that person's computer and then does the new hire has to spend the next 7 days setting up their accounts and apps? Isn't this frustrating? Not with Windows Autopilot. Welcome to onboarding made easy.
Windows Autopilot was introduced as a way to facilitate zero-touch, self-service deployments in enterprises or large educational organizations, but can also now be used for small and mid size businesses. It changes the way we deploy Windows devices. Traditionally, organizations purchase a hundred to thousands of new devices every year, ship them to IT, wipe them clean, and re-image them with a new, custom corporate image. While this image may include many common corporate applications, it usually does not include the user's personal data or specific business applications - and is a really time consuming process for both IT and the new hires.
New devices that are unboxed by the new hires are dynamically configured in the background while the user interacts with the status enrollment page.
All configurations and data can flow down to the device out-of-the box with Intune and can be secured and configured without IT interaction. After a few minutes, or sometimes a few hours depending on how large your download is, the device is ready for productive use, including:
This leads to an improved user experience as well as time savings for IT as they now do not have to wipe a clean version of Windows to add a custom legacy version of Windows. In addition, the upcoming hybrid join with Active Directory allows you to include more users, e.g., for a Windows 7 to 10 migration.
This is achieved by joining the device into the Azure Active Directory, enrolling it into Intune, and letting Intune push the configuration down (Microsoft's Modern IT Vision) or in a hybrid scenario that includes traditional desktop management tools (the Microsoft Configuration Manager and Active Directory).
Windows Autopilot is designed to simplify all parts of the life cycle of Windows devices, for both IT and end users, from initial deployment through the eventual end of life. Leveraging cloud-based services, it can reduce the overall costs for deploying, managing, and retiring devices by reducing the amount of time that IT needs to spend on these processes and the amount of infrastructure that they need to maintain, while ensuring ease of use for all types of end users. Everything after that is fully automated.
Windows Autopilot allows you to:
Windows Autopilot depends on specific capabilities available in Windows 10 and Azure Active Directory. It also requires an MDM service such as Microsoft Intune. These capabilities can be obtained through various editions and subscription programs:
To provide needed Azure Active Directory (automatic MDM enrollment and company branding features) and MDM functionality, one of the following is required:
Before Windows Autopilot can be used, some configuration tasks are required to support the common Autopilot scenarios.
Specific scenarios will then have additional requirements. Generally, there are two specific tasks:
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