IT Pro Verdict

System Center in the cloud it isn’t, but Windows Intune is a simple and valuable cloud service to manage PCs in smaller businesses that would otherwise have no management infrastructure.

By Mary Branscombe

published 28 March 2011

in Reviews

A wealth of details about managed PCs is available, from the BIOS version to free disk space to what printers are installed. This is handy for planning as well as troubleshooting, but this is all rather hidden deep inside the lower levels of the Computers section when it should really be available under reports along with the software details.

There are gaps in what InTune can do in this first release, although since it's a cloud service, you'll get extra functionality automatically as it's released. Although you can manage Remote Assistance requests from users and subsequently take control of their desktops, you can't use Intune to start a Remote Desktop connection. There aren't as many options as with other remote support and control tools such as LogMeIn, TeamViewer, NetViewer or GoToAssist, although they don't have the management tools that are part of InTune either.

The software inventory discovers the full range of software installed on PCs and identifies it from a knowledge base that Microsoft maintains. Unfortunately the only licences you can manage are Microsoft licences and few small businesses run entirely on Microsoft software. This is an issue the Intune team is looking at; even if a future version allows multi-vendor licence details it's unlikely every licence is going to be in a format Intune would understand. Even being able to enter licence agreements by hand would be a useful way of putting it all in one place for reporting.

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Mary is a freelance business technology journalist who has written for the likes of ITPro, CIO, ZDNet, TechRepublic, The New Stack, The Register, and many other online titles, as well as national publications like the Guardian and Financial Times. She has also held editor positions at AOL’s online technology channel, PC Plus, IT Expert, and Program Now. In her career spanning more than three decades, the Oxford University-educated journalist has seen and covered the development of the technology industry through many of its most significant stages.

Mary has experience in almost all areas of technology but specialises in all things Microsoft and has written two books on Windows 8. She also has extensive expertise in consumer hardware and cloud services - mobile phones to mainframes. Aside from reporting on the latest technology news and trends, and developing whitepapers for a range of industry clients, Mary also writes short technology mysteries and publishes them through Amazon.