Updates to Intune are Happening as You Read This

[Brad Anderson]

First published on CloudBlogs on Dec 08, 2014
Right now the Intune service is being updated around the world with that I believe is the most significant set of updates in the history of the product.  [update:  and now even more updates !] In May, at TechEd North America, we outlined a bold set of deliverables for Intune in 2015, and we released these to the market in the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS). With this set of updates to Intune we are completing the delivery of what we said we would deliver by the end of the calendar year. It is incredibly rewarding to see this release rolling out. We’ve kept our word and delivered exactly what we said we would.

Here is a quick summary of what is rolling out right now:

• Mobile Application Management. We are rolling out the containers (and everything associated with the containers) that enable you to separate corporate data and apps from consumer apps, as well as enable the free sharing of content across corporate apps while blocking the sharing of data from corporate to consumer apps. This work includes a container solution on iOS and Android.
• Conditional Access to Exchange Online. You can now restrict access to Exchange online to devices that are enrolled for management and meet the compliance policies you require for corporate e-mail to be used on the device. Conditional access for Exchange 2013 (on-prem) was shipped in November.
• Deep Management of the Office Mobile Apps on iOS and Android. You can deeply manage the behavior of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on iOS and Android, including the ability to restrict actions such as cut, copy, paste, and where users save their files. The Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps in the Apple App Store are instrumented to be managed by Intune and participate in the MDM and container that is delivered today. The same is the case for the Office mobile apps for Android that are in preview today. The Office mobile apps are only participating in the Intune MAM/container solution.
• Managed Browser. We are releasing a managed Browser app for iOS and Android devices that controls the actions that users can perform, including allow/deny access to specific websites. This enables organizations to have corporate websites (and links in e-mail to corporate sites) flow through a managed browser and keep it separated from the user’s personal web browser on iOS and Android devices.
• Managed PDF View, AV Player and Image Viewer apps. The managed apps for Android devices enable you to open corporate videos and documents within managed apps where you can control how that data is used and keep it separated from personal content. For iOS we are relying on the in-line of included viewers.
• Bulk enrollment of iOS devices using Apple Configurator. Integration with the bulk enrollment capabilities from Apple to simplify the enrollment process for bringing lots of iOS devices under management . We have also integrated with the Apple Configurator to enable the creation of configuration files that can then be imported into Intune to set custom iOS policies.

With these updates I strongly believe we have the best EMM solution on the market right now . We are strong in Mobile Device Management (MDM), and we deliver the capabilities you would expect us to deliver. With this set of releases, we are now delivering a complete Mobile Application Management (MAM) including deep integration with the Office mobile apps as the centerpiece. In fact, the only way that you can deeply manage the Office mobile apps is through Intune. Combine our MDM, MAM, and Office integration with the other components of the Enterprise Mobility Suite and there is no doubt we are delivering the premiere solution for Enabling Enterprise Mobility. It is a very happy and rewarding day here for all the EMS teams!