Microsoft Windows Intune review

Managing and protecting an office full of PCs doesn't necessarily entail the complications of Active Directory or domain joined accounts as Mary Branscombe discovers.

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.

A PC that's properly managed costs a business far less money to maintain thanks to properly enforced security, less hands-on support, less downtime and therefore increased productivity for the users. The numbers are significant for large businesses; for smaller companies the principles are the same but with fewer machines to spread the savings across, the advantage is slightly different. They can avoid downtime, security problems, and perhaps data loss too, without taking too much time away from somebody who almost certainly has another job to do in the business as well.

For that kind of business, System Centre or Novell ZENworks is overkill. Windows Intune, Microsoft's new cloud service, aims to make PC management and security simple for businesses with no existing management infrastructure. You don't need to have Active Directory, and if you have AD you don't need the users you're managing to be joined to the domain or to log in via VPN. You just need to install the agent software on the PCs and then log in to the cloud service (using a web browser of course) to see managed PCs and push settings.

IT PRO Innovation Award

Intune doesn't assume one administrator is going to do everything; you can have multiple administrators on the service and split alerts between them by category, and a consultant can support multiple businesses.

There are several main tools available in Intune. You can approve and deploy Windows updates to PCs and take care of management and reporting for the endpoint malware protection included with the service the protection is essentially identical to Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010, including the same behavioural detection and regular updates. There are also tools for setting simple security policies; asset management for software, Microsoft licences and PC hardware, and remote assistance and user support too.

Mary Branscombe

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.