Autopilot - Win10 Home OEM Device & Education A5 / assigning Win 10 Education licence

Brass Contributor

I have recently started a new job and with all the Covid stuff a project to move everyone to remote working on a more permanent basis has been brought forward, so a number of laptops were ordered and I am tasked with setting up Autopilot and Intune to facilitate automated builds/deployments. Ive no problem setting it up but I have found out the ordered laptops have been bought with Win 10 Home OEM on the, and that Autopilot does not work with Home Edition. We have plenty of Win 10 Education licences that are not assigned and the plan was to use them but the question is how can I utilize those on the laptops and do so in an automated way and also so that autopilot will remain with Education level Win 10 for any resets (therefore check in with Autopilot).
I thought about the possibility of requesting the laptop vendor to image the machines with a custom OEM/Recovery partition that has Windows Education version or just a standard KMS key from MS site , which will hoipefully enabl  but from research im not sure that it is allowed reimage and replace OEM like that. It seems crazy that we have paid for laptops with OEM windows licence and also paid volume licencing for M365 Education A5 yet might have to pay for upgrade from Home to Pro as well to get this working!

Grateful for any ideas as it scuppers my whole project quite a bit and there is a freeze on spending due to the crisis so really want to avoid trying to pay for licences in such as wasteful way.

3 Replies

@PhilRiceUoS 

 

This is a difficult situation you find yourself in.  I can't think of a way that you can avoid needing Windows 10 Pro on the device first as this is going to be needed to join the devices to Azure AD.   Did the supplier make a mistake and send with the wrong version of Windows 10 or was your order incorrect?

@PeterRising No it wasnt a mistake or anything but more a case of me starting on this project , spotting that this was the case - the first batch of laptops were ordered before I even started the job and this project was in play. Ive flagged it and we are trying to adjust for the second order batch, but Im looking to see if there was some workaround for the first order if it is too late to switch to a different OEM license version. The vendor is being contacted and we are seeing if there is a way we can get pro OEM so hopefully that will work out.

I do think the licensing model overall needs simplifying though and in regards autopilot a good solution would be if you could assign a license (or licensed user) to a registered hardware ID so autopilot could check in and see if it was registered and if there was a enterprise license assigned it would know to install as that regardless of it being a Home OEM or not. 

@PhilRiceUoS 

 

Agreed that there could be some improvements made here.  Autopilot has improved greatly in recent times and am sure will continue to get better.

 

Hope you manage to get the adjustment made with your vendor.