In this new series, I am excited to share highlights of the new capabilities we’ve built and released in Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Every month, I plan to summarize just a few of the new additions from our engineering team. Give them a try! Let me know which one is your favorite by commenting back on this post, connecting with me on LinkedIn, or tagging me @RamyaChitrakar on Twitter.
2102 (February) Release & Microsoft Ignite Edition
While you can find the full list of engineering investments we’ve made at What’s New, here are a few of my favorite additions to Microsoft Endpoint Manager! I have been tracking these closely because they help you realize your Zero Trust goals and enable remote work while ensuring the productivity of end users. I’ve left off a few I’ve talked about already - Microsoft Tunnel, for example - so be sure to also listen to my Microsoft Ignite session for the complete list of What’s New and What’s Coming Soon in Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
Continued investments in Endpoint analytics - new features requested by IT
We’re announcing two Endpoint analytics features this month that will optimize your time and the quality of the experience you’re delivering to end users. Endpoint analytics is a feature of Microsoft Endpoint Manager that helps you to better understand and improve end-user experience. As an IT Admin, you play a tremendous role in balancing the security and management needs of your organization and your end users’ productivity - and then layer in the complexities that remote work has brought us all.
We are adding two new, highly requested features: application reliability and restart frequency. The new application reliability feature will provide greater visibility across your entire organization to tell you how well your apps are functioning. Users are never happy when an app crashes and their flow is broken, or worst case they lose the work, they just did. The second feature – restart frequency information – provides insights into the existing startup performance report to help you identify problematic devices. Both these features help you improve your end-user experience by giving you better visibility into the device experience.
Read this post for more on using these new features, and below, you’ll see a screenshot of the application reliability feature! I’m excited; I hope you are too!
New All Devices Export Experience – If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of your day looking at data and making decisions based on that data. In our daily shiproom, we need flexibility to view data that allows us to make investments and customizations are key. Similarly, we’ve heard from you that you want to customize the All Devices list. This is why the new device export experience is one I’m excited for. So many customers I talk with use this report daily, and with this feature, you can consistently export all the columns if you’d like to. This way you can make data-based decisions.
Here's the admin UI from one of our test accounts -
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint risk signals available for your App protection policies (preview)
With this release, you can now configure a setting within your App Protection Policy (APP, also known as MAM) Conditional Launch policy to include 'Max allowed threat level' signals from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Android and iOS/iPadOS. You can choose to Block Access or Wipe Data based on whether or not the device meets the expected threat level. End users will be prompted to install and set up the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint app from the appropriate store (e.g., Google Play). As a prerequisite, don't forget to set up your Microsoft Defender for Endpoint connector and switch on the toggle to send risk data to your App Protection Policies.
In this first post, I’ve discovered it’s hard to pick just a few of our engineering investments as many span the product. I will pick some each sprint to represent the breadth of our capabilities and those that have been asked for by our customers. Read What’s New in the 2102 release for all new features and releases and watch What’s New in Microsoft Endpoint Manager at Microsoft Ignite. I am incredibly proud of the work the team does. We listen to your feedback and make changes and investments based on your goals to improve the end-user experience and simplify IT.
Follow me for more! Comment back on this post, connect with me on LinkedIn, or tag me @RamyaChitrakar on Twitter.