Now that Microsoft Ignite has passed we can continue on with some of the final pieces of the equation that were discussed in Orlando. The two things I’ll focus on here are Policy Analytics and and Client Side Extensions, Let’s start with an image showing some of these investments that are being made.

The Group Policy Analytics feature coming to Intune/Microsoft Endpoint Manager to help with the identification and migration of existing Group Policy settings over to MDM settings in Intune. While the goal of some will be to move everything to the cloud, for others this tool will really just be highlighting what GP settings are being applied to Hybrid AAD Devices, even if they aren’t receiving any Intune policies.

If you are planning on moving from GP to MDM, this is the list you can use to make sure you aren’t mixing related or conflicting policies across GP and MDM. The recommendation is to not mix and match related policies across both management methods, instead focus on the one where it makes the most sense. If there are GP settings that aren’t easily reproducible via MDM, keep the related settings in GP and then reassess in the future. If the opposite as true, and these are settings you can easily move related settings to MDM, that makes sense for current as well as future device deployments.

It’s an installable Windows app that will read CSP based settings, and will then set the client side extensions in Windows. This will help to reduce the scripting burden that many have been under when trying to move over to a modern management approach, and will be a native part of Intune configuration. The first release is aiming to include support for audit, mapped drive and policy key registry settings.

While moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10 doesn’t mean you have to embrace more elements of modern management, there are benefits that have been covered in this series that show that even Hybrid AAD Join can bring benefits, and then for new devices, especially those that are mostly going to be mobile, having an MDM strategy makes sense.