New Microsoft Intune Survival Guide

If you remember, part of my 2014 parting gift to all of you was a bit of insight into the technologies you should focus on for 2015. I made the list pretty simple on purpose, offering three suggestions to help bolster your professional life for the coming year. Those three suggestions were PowerShell, Microsoft Intune, and Hybrid Cloud. Read that missive here: 3 Technologies to Focus On in 2015 for IT Job Security.

Clearly, Hybrid Cloud and PowerShell are still just as important, but as we've seen over the few short months of 2015, Microsoft Intune is blossoming into real force. Microsoft is now delivering updates and new features monthly and the product is quickly becoming a valuable asset to many companies intent on getting computers and devices under control. Just this week, Microsoft announced a subset of Microsoft Intune features have become available for Office 365 business, education, and government subscribers for free. Titled MDM for Office 365, the new functionality is the company's freemium carrot stick to hopefully lead customers to full Microsoft Intune capabilities. There are distinct differences between MDM for Office 365 and the full version, but the new integration shows how serious Microsoft is about making Microsoft Intune capabilities available to a wider audience.

But, as an IT Pro looking to get more information about Microsoft Intune, there's not much. We cover it here quite a bit on WindowsITPro, and there's a smattering of content available in blogs and such. But, everybody and their brother, sister, and dog has a blog. And, blogs are blogs, not generally considered trusted resources because they are not part of a larger, trustworthy organization that vets content for technical acumen. Blogs are like public notices hung up on a bulletin board at the local Wal-Mart.

Plus, there's the Microsoft documentation in the TechNet library. But, as we've all experienced, Microsoft documentation is stellar, but it doesn’t take into account real customer scenarios. Microsoft's documentation is a great start, but it's written in a way to show how Microsoft intended the product to work, not necessarily how customers actually use it.

So, how to you muddle through finding great, real-world information?

A new Microsoft Intune Survival Guide has been unveiled on the Microsoft Wiki web site. It seeks to cobble together and curate the good, trusted information from around the web providing blog posts, articles, and resources. Since it’s a Wiki, those with proper access can add links to additional resources to help build the guide into a true community-created tome of information.

You should visit and bookmark the guide, even if you have nothing to add. To keep track of updates, you can grab the RSS feed and if you use the Editing tool there's an option to be notified of any changed to the page through email.