5. Cloud-Native Endpoints – Group Policy Analytics – EMS Route

Group Policies are a major piece of the Cloud-Native Endpoints puzzle and it’s not always easy to track back and remove the legacy policies and now you are planning on policy push via Intune and it’s vital to add the GPOs in to the mix.

Chances are there are GPO settings you still want to apply even when the device is Entra Joined state.

Rather than re-creating the GPOs in Intune, there is now a way to analyse the policies in Intune, create the Intune policy and apply to the endpoints.

The good thing is, this can be a parallel activity where you can test the newly created Intune policy while the GPOs are working as usual, but make sure you apply the policy the MDM win over GPO if you are applying the policy to the same device.

Enter, Intune Group Policy Analytics…

This is one of the best features in Intune, according to my ratings. Because this has made the On-premises GPO moving so easy and chances are, you don’t need to re-create the same policy again in Intune, and it will take care of it. Now, when I say “Chances Are”, there is a catch to this. We earlier looked at how the GPO settings can be legacy or outdated, or simply created to manage old Windows settings or Operating Systems. Well, if you analyze a GPO like that in Intune, you will see the settings are probably unknown to Intune. This is no surprise as Intune is made to manage modern endpoints using modern settings and policies. However, I have seen that sometimes, the policy settings can be found if you search for them by using some keywords but not using the same setting as it is in the GPO. Most of the time, wording can be a bit tricky. Also, I must agree that Intune is an ever-expanding ecosystem, and the settings that are not available today may be available next week. This has been the case sometimes.

While some settings have the MDM Support as below

Some settings are either not available in Intune or Intune has already deprecated the settings

Once you are done with the settings you can either migrate them into a single Intune Config policy or create separate policies.

Next Up

I want to touch base on Device Preparation/ Windows Autopilot using Intune in the next section.