By: Maggie Dakeva, Senior Product Manager - Microsoft Intune
Organizations have spent years refining Windows Autopilot deployments. Profiles, Enrollment Status Page settings, group tags, dynamic gr...
Published Sep 16, 2026
Version 1.0
Blog Post
Just tested it. Still a hard pass for most of our customers.
- Still have to do a manual and convoluted hash collection method
- No equivalent of group tags or a way to group a device without creating a policy for each group
- Seemingly no way to collect the hash remotely with powershell
Why not just fix normal Autopilot so that we don’t have to mess about with this? It’s so bad but we’ll use it internally because even though Microsoft is saying this won’t replace Autopilot, we all know where its going.
- Maggie_Dakeva
Microsoft
drkmccy thank you for the call outs on what would prevent broad adoption. We're working on simplifying the device info upload. As for group tags, are there scenarios you find cannot be achieved with the current enrollment time grouping option?
The reason we couldn't fix the older Autopilot is because the architecture was limiting and we really couldn't improve reliability much more. We're also limited in what new features can be built. Changing the architecture under the covers had a great risk to break customers so we decided to split into a new solution. In parallel, we were looking at enabling a more secure option for tenant affinity than what registration can offer which is where device association came in.
Thanks for the reply. Why can't it be like Apple or Samsung where I can upload a device by scanning a QR with an app in which I'm signed in as admin? As it happens, Rudy Ooms has written a powershell script to do the upload much easier. As usual, its left for the community to pick up Microslop's slack.
No, currently the scenarios provided by ADPD cannot recreate what can be done with group tags. We can have group tags set with dynamic groups to segregate devices by type, region, department, etc. This is particularly useful in higher education where we want to target a particular room in a particular floor in a prticular building, or the whole building, or the whole floor, or the whole department across many buildings. There needs to be a way to "tag" devices at the point of AP registration and say "This is a finance desktop in on floor 2 of the Lincoln Building located in Omaha, Nebraska" e.g. group tag "D-NE-OMA-LINC-2-FIN".
If you want an improvement over current AP, it would be the ability to tag devices with multiple tags, then use device filters or dynamic groups to bundle and target devices. But even just a single tag that we separate with hyphens as is done currently by lots of orgs will work.
As for device association, it's not as good as normal Autopilot as the device is not locked to the tenant. And given what I have heard about ADPD, it
