Auto Pilot works, but with so many limitations that for us its practically useless. Most of these limitations really come down to limitations in Intune. Here are what I view many of the limitations are:
- Domain Join to AD you have to be connected to the intranet. That might have been addressed, I haven't checked lately. So sending a machine to a user and having them domain join doesn't work. Microsoft is trying to push everyone to Azure AD instead, that actually does work. Unfortunately we require AD.
- Machine naming is a prefix, after that its a random number. Completely brain dead on trying to assign a machine name. This isn't a huge technical detail, but it does cause some issues with asset tracking and support.
- Very limited OU support.
- Targeting is mostly user based, and while you can do some machine targeting, it treats pretty much everyone the same. Setting these up to deal with local or business differences is very difficult. Its not like SCCM where you can create dynamic collections, variable assignments, or even ask questions during OSD.
- Dependencies is the main show stopper. If you need language packs installed before you install a language adaptable application you have to use an advanced packaging technique called batch files. On the positive side batch files can be setup to do limited decision tree operations. In other words no precedence, dependency or conditional branching.
The whole Intune idea is that everything is a cloud based experience where user's have control. If everything is in the cloud, apps are all store based, and work independently of each other it might be possible. That's basically what happens on a smartphone. Here's the problem, Windows computers the applications can and do interact. For instance, if you use WebEx and want the Office extensions to be loaded, Office has to be installed before the WebEx components. Try and explain to users that they need to add things in order. I've never gotten a user to follow a set of instructions completely. That's why Auto Pilot doesn't work.