[Day 2] Mission Intune : When Migration Becomes a Mission (Almost) Impossible

Nice article and again a statement which we see here so often: Intune is not a real "goto" solution but more like a "have to" solution when forced by procurement as it's cheaper than other solutions (which also work way better from my experience and what i read here from others).

I'm not a fan of calling any product bad but Intune really made it through a lot of hands with same opinions. Never heard of someone telling "Intune is nice" or so.

What a great post Kris​ - it's so insightful and I like the humour with which this was written 😊

It's interesting to hear you share this opinion Moombas​! 

Nice article! 

The last part made me a bit sad, "we make do with Intune". It doesn't seem like Intune is a good fit for you, and you shouldnt have to be forced to migrate to Intune. But its a reality I hear way to often. 

Moombas​ is right, its a have to solution. It works for the average company with just basic management, but anything more than that is just not going to work very well. 

Great article, funny and interesting.  

I keep as far away from Intune as possible, but slightly surprised Google published this, hopefully a wakeup call to Microsoft.  

Thank you, Kris​ , for taking the time to be part of the festival and sharing your experience with migrating to a new EMM. Migrating anything can be stressful, and I am sure this topic is of interest to many community members here.

I am sorry to hear your deployment has not been as straightforward as expected - there is some very useful feedback here. I know there are a few community members who are also using Intune, so I wonder if anyone reading this could offer any constructive tips or advice on any of the areas highlighted here that could help? Perhaps we can get a good conversation going around this? 

Thanks again, 

Lizzie

I've been a little less active in the community lately. This is partly because we are also looking into using Intune. What can Intune do, how can you continue to connect on-premises services effectively, what would migration look like? So I can really relate to the article.

At events, I often ask other admins which UEM they use and how satisfied they are with it. Personally, as Moombas wrote, I have mostly heard that Intune was a ”have to” decision, because it's "free" in E3/E5. Accordingly, I was mentally prepared to be disappointed by the tests. And oh boy, I noticed problems that I hadn't expected at all. The problems do not necessarily apply to all customers. The higher the overall integration into the Microsoft ecosystem and the less complex other requirements are, the easier an Intune migration might be.

For an overview of the market, you can certainly look at opinions from market researchers on the subject of UEM (e.g., Gartner or IDC). At first glance, you get the impression that this is a market leader with comprehensive functionality (compared to other companies). However, this result does not reveal that this is not the case and that much of it has to be - if even possible - built in-house using the GraphAPI.

Migration can be really difficult to calculate. Which features do you really want to keep, and what do you need to develop or buy in advance to do so? Is the configured RBAC model functioning as intended? How might processes need to be changed? How do you deal with the mandatory factory reset for corporate-owned devices? Even if Android Enterprise offers simplified UEM migration like iOS26, such a migration is not something that can be done just like that.

While reading, I thought to myself, “September 2023 to December 2024” won't be enough time to migrate tens of thousands of devices. It's not really something to be happy about if you're right. Because we know what it's like to have to correct overly ambitious decisions.