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In meetings with leadership or presentations to organizations, I often present charts or statistics that show high-level progress—lines with steep ascents, donut graphs nearly overflowing with positivity—but behind each of those big numbers is a continual chain of incremental improvements. Making it easier for IT admins to manage devices by reducing the amount of effort required and improving the health and security of devices can lead to more productive teams and more hockey stick graphs. This month’s highlights are all about making life better for IT professionals working in the Microsoft Intune console.

Require more than one approver for remote actions

One way to improve efficiency is to avoid catastrophe. The ability to remove corporate data from devices managed by Intune is powerful. It can reduce data leakage when devices are lost or stolen and speed up the process of preparing devices for new users. But these powerful actions can also cause problems if initiated by mistake or by malicious intent. In this month’s release, we’re allowing organizations to set up access policies that will require approval from another administrator before taking remote actions like retire/wipe/delete. As part of the approval process, requestors can be prompted to add a business justification, and approvers are able to make notes on their decisions—all of which can make audits and investigations clearer. Learn more about multiple administrator approvals.

Microsoft Intune Remote Help sessions for select unattended Android devices

Another capability rolling out this month is part of Intune Remote Help: protection of unattended sessions for Zebra and Samsung devices that are enrolled as Android Enterprise corporate-owned, dedicated devices. This functionality helps avoid problems before they start by allowing administrators to control a device remotely without input from a user. Previously, the device being accessed would display what is taking place while the session is in progress, but this can present security and privacy concerns—especially if that device is visible publicly. With this release, administrators will be able to block the device screen from displaying the actions being taken, helping to prevent inadvertent sharing of privileged information. If a user interacts with the device at that time, they will only see a message that a Remote Help session is in progress.  Read more about Remote Help for Android.

Boost Linux Server endpoint security

For organizations looking to help secure Linux Servers, Intune now offers a new endpoint security policy called global exclusions. Thanks to the integration of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Entra ID, these exclusions can even be applied to devices managed with Defender for Endpoint and not enrolled to Intune. The exclusion settings apply to both Microsoft Defender Antivirus and Defender for Endpoint endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities, and they can help mitigate performance issues and reduce false positives. By excluding trusted files and processes to your organization, you can focus on high-fidelity signals and improve overall security. Read the exclusions documentation for more details.

Explore Android, iOS, and macOS device inventory

Getting detailed data such as serial numbers and SIM card information about individual devices used to require a lot of effort. Last year we launched device hardware inventory for Windows devices, and this month we expand device inventory capabilities to include Android, iOS, and macOS devices. Now, 74 Apple properties and 32 Android properties like SIM card data, serial numbers, etc. will be collected by default. These are available in Resource Explorer to all Intune administrators and, for organizations licensed for the Microsoft Intune Advanced Analytics or the Microsoft Intune Suite, this data is also searchable in multidevice queries and usable in custom reporting.

If these updates have helped you or your team, we want to hear about it. How has an Intune update made device management easier? What are the next features that you’d love to see? Leave us a comment with your requests.

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