You're reading from Microsoft Intune Cookbook

Product typeBook

Published inJan 2024

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781805126546

Edition1st Edition

Concepts

Cloud Security

Author (1)

Andrew Taylor

Configuring Your New Tenant for Windows Devices

Now that your tenant is built and we have some Entra ID groups and roles configured, we can start populating the Intune environment.

To do so, we use policies that are equivalent to Group Policies in a traditional Active Directory configuration. These are used to configure your devices with the settings chosen within the Intune portal. This chapter looks at the different policy options for Windows devices to configure any non-security settings.

There are a variety of ways to configure policies, which we will cover in this chapter. This chapter will include the following recipes:

Configuring a Settings catalog policy
Configuring a Custom policy
Importing and ingesting an ADMX policy
Group policy analytics

Technical requirements

For this chapter, you will need a modern web browser and a PowerShell code editor such as Visual Studio Code or PowerShell ISE.

All of the scripts referenced can be found here:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Microsoft-Intune-Cookbook/tree/main/Chapter2

Before following the following recipes, you may first need to re-authenticate to Microsoft Graph, as covered in Chapter 1.

Chapter materials

Before moving on to configuring our policies, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

Firstly, some settings can be configured in multiple places, especially when looking at security policies, so it is always worth keeping in mind what you are configuring and where to avoid making conflicting policies. Even if a setting has the same value in two different policies, it will be marked as a conflict within the GUI.

The other thing is the concept of tattooing. Some settings when applied can leave the setting configured on a device when switched to Not Configured within Intune. If there is a setting with the Enabled or Not Configured options, changing it to Not Configured does not send a signal to undo the configuration on the device; it simply tells Intune not to do anything with that particular setting and leave it to whatever happens to be set on the device already. Normally, this will just be the default Windows settings, but if it is a policy you have...

Configuring a Settings catalog policy

We will start with Settings catalog (or Unified Settings catalog) policies, which will be your primary policy type moving forward. Many of the older policies are being migrated to Settings catalog, and due to the nature of the Graph underneath these new policy types, this allows for significantly more available settings (there are well over 25,000 at the time of writing).

Settings catalog is also cross-platform and can be used for Windows, macOS, and iOS policies at present, with more being migrated daily. You will find the vast majority of your traditional on-premises Group Policy Objects (GPOs) here as well. If there is a setting you cannot find, there are other deployment methods, which will be covered in the following recipes.

As a Settings catalog policy can contain many thousands of policy settings, it can become more difficult to troubleshoot and slow to load and edit within a browser. Similar to when dealing with on-premises GPO,...

Configuring a custom policy

While the Settings catalog (and other options in the following recipes) will capture 99% of your needs in a standard environment, there may be times when you need to set CSP settings directly on machines and there is no template available.

For this recipe, we are going to use the policy that skips the User Settings section within the Enrollment Status Page (ESP) (there will be more on that in Chapter 4), which can be useful if you are happy that all of the key apps are targeted at the device setup and you do not want users to wait for the user-targeted apps to finish installing.

A custom Open Mobile Alliance Uniform Resource Identifier (OMA-URI) policy allows you to directly set the CSP settings, but you have to be careful that what you enter matches exactly what is expected, as these policies are very exact and will fail if a setting is incorrect.

Getting ready

As mentioned, for this example, we will skip the user status page, details of which...

Importing and ingesting an ADMX policy

A relatively new (and welcome) addition is the ability to ingest ADMX policies directly within the console. This is useful for your third-party products, which do not have policies configured within the Settings catalog and are easier to configure than custom OMA-URI policies.

Getting ready

For this example, we will use the Mozilla Firefox policy templates. The templates can be downloaded from this location: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/releases.

The process is the same for any ADMX-based Architecture Description Markup Language (ADML), so feel free to use others if needed.

After downloading and extracting your templates, you will need firefox.admx and the matching ADML for your preferred language.

How to do it…

Follow this recipe to ingest and configure a policy for Mozilla Firefox:

Inside the Intune portal, navigate to Devices | Windows | Configuration profiles.
At the top, next to where it says...

Group policy analytics

While it is generally recommended to create your new policies from scratch to reduce the amount of technical debt when migrating to Intune, you may have certain group policies configured in your on-premises Active Directory that you feel are good enough to be migrated directly to Intune. For this, we can use Group Policy analytics, which will ingest your policies, tell you which can be migrated, and also, if selected, migrate them for you.

Getting ready

The first thing we need is an XML export of the group policy we wish to inspect for compatibility with Intune. If you do not have a domain controller available, there is an example within GitHub here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Microsoft-Intune-Cookbook/blob/main/Chapter2/gpreport.xml:

Within Active Directory, navigate to Group Policy Objects:

Figure 2.11 – Group Policy Objects

Right-click on the Group Policy in question and click Back Up…...

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Author (1)

Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is an End-User Compute architect with 20 years IT experience across industries and a particular interest in Microsoft Cloud technologies, PowerShell and Microsoft Graph. Andrew graduated with a degree in Business Studies in 2004 from Lancaster University and since then has obtained numerous Microsoft certifications including Microsoft 365 Enterprise Administrator Expert, Azure Solutions Architect Expert and Cybersecurity Architect Expert amongst others. He currently working as an EUC Architect for an IT Company in the United Kingdom, planning and automating the products across the EUC space. Andrew lives on the coast in the North East of England with his wife and two daughters.
Read more about Andrew Taylor

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