Seeing that we are in a new year, I thought it was time to revisit Microsoft 365 Business to discuss some of the things that you should consider implementing in your environment. This month I’m going to start off with an easy one, getting ready for the new Microsoft Edge.
Why start with Edge? First of all it’s now generally available, and secondly it’s very easy to deploy and manage it with Intune via the Microsoft Endpoint Management admin center. There will be some different considerations you have to take into account depending on what browsers are currently in use. I’ll focus on two scenarios here, those that are using Chrome, and those that were relying on the built in browsers.
If you are considering moving users from Chrome to Edge, the two items that are top of mind are extensions and Google account usage. As many extensions should be compatible, use this as an opportunity to identify which ones are already in use, and of those that are needed, which are supported on Edge. For extension auditing via PowerShell, take a look at these posts on Spiceworks and Reddit
The second part of the Chrome to Edge migration story is what Google services are being leveraged via browser sync. If you have disabled this capability, that’s an easy discussion, but in many environments this may not have been tightly controlled and users may be synchronizing favorites, passwords etc. via their Google accounts. Much of what happens here isn’t necessarily going to be a technical conversation, and may end up being company policy overriding users prior habits. This could be a fun conversation, and potentially a show stopper in some cases, depending on who in the organisation is going to be impacted.
You can sign in to an Edge profile using your Azure Active Directory credentials (this will happen automatically in situations like AAD Joined devices), and this will prompt for settings sync. The option to sync can be presented after Edge is deployed, giving the ability to customize the settings.
If you click Customize sync settings you see that Favorites, Settings, Saved passwords, Addresses and more, and Collections are shown as sync options.
However, once you jump in to Settings, Profiles, Sync, you can see that there is more to come, including History, Open tabs and Extensions.
If the currently available sync options meet your needs (assuming you plan on using sync), or at least get you started with a pilot, you probably want to use the AutoImportAtFirstRun policy instead of leaving everything to the user. This policy allows you to entirely skip autoimport, import from the default browser, or import from Internet Explorer or Chrome. You can access this easily from the Microsoft Endpoint Manager Edge ADMX settings, as seen below.
In the next post I’ll cover a step by step deployment and covering some of the other management tasks you should be implementing to get started, but for now, you can take a look at Joe Belfiore’s blog post on Edge becoming generally available, and some of what it offers.
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