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How to Run a Successful Microsoft Intune Migration (With No Screw Ups)

On July 27th 2022, the Juriba team held a webinar to explore the paths available for organizations migrating to Microsoft Intune, what’s involved throughout this process and how Juriba’s Workplace Automation Solutions, Dashworks and AppM, can help to accelerate you along the journey.

Hosted by Juriba’s Co-Founder and CEO Barry Angell, myself and Dashworks Product Manager Neil Wheeler, I wanted to take the opportunity to share the recording with you and summarize the key points.

On-Demand: Juriba MS Intune Webinar

So, Why Are We Here Today?

In previous blogs, we've discussed that running a successful Microsoft Intune migration is undoubtedly complex and comes with challenges. It requires a well thought strategy and needs careful consideration and planning on how to approach the migration, adoption of the right tools and processes, as well as organizational buy in from key people across the business. Oh, and yes it also needs to be achieved in a way that delivers efficiency, saves time, resources, budget, yet runs parallel to business-as-usual.

Many experts and organizations agree that moving end user asset and application management to the cloud and migrating to Microsoft Intune should be a no brainer. We agree. However, for many customers and organizations this move to a single platform is aspirational, the reality being that many will adopt a co-managed estate using the best parts of Microsoft Intune and SCCM because Intune is a maturing toolset compared with the vastly functional SCCM. Additionally, customers see Microsoft Intune as a great new technology without fully understanding the strategic outcome of moving to that technology - especially when it comes to costs and running the environment moving forward. Hence the potential screw ups!

How Automation Can Accelerate Your Microsoft Intune Migration

Migrating to Microsoft Intune requires significant planning across three key areas. It's understanding your existing inventory, whether your applications need work before they can migrate, and how to organise the work while minimising business disruption. Gathering all the information your business needs to plan and implement a successful migration with the right velocity is critical. Trying to execute this manually just isn’t achievable at scale - something we’re confident about based on our many years of experience using automation.

“Juriba really is about helping organizations manage end user change and since it was founded 14 years ago, we’ve helped organizations and partners to help their customers to manage Evergreen IT and migration programmes.  Our software has migrated over 10 million assets across the globe – resulting in us gaining lots of experience and best practice along the way”.  - Barry Angell, Juriba CEO.

At Juriba we've focussed on reducing the pain for each step of your end-to-end Microsoft Intune migration.  Our magic ingredient? Automation. Let me explain more.

Microsoft Intune Migration In 7 Steps

Most Microsoft Intune migrations take longer than expected and application readiness tends to be a major bottleneck in the process.

Application teams are incredibly busy, responsible for not just packaging and testing but also tasks like coordinating with application owners and end users to understand and get sign off that the application still works with new formats and deployment methods. The time and resources needed from the application team are significant, and the implications of application failures to project delivery are huge.

There are also many strategic considerations to review before getting into the migration. Is there a business case and strategy for moving endpoint management to the cloud? Who’s in charge of the rollout? Is this a project or business as usual? How do we prioritize and fund the workload? What is our rollout/deployment plan? For example, if we were doing things in the old way to get ready for Intune, it would take a lot of time to get the applications categorized, prioritized, re-packaged, tested, published and available for deployment.

So, the challenge Juriba took away was to make this migration process as simple as possible and to develop a better way to give customers the platform tools they need to automate the process in a single workflow.

We are excited to share with you a framework that we have built that moves through the Microsoft Intune migration in 7 simple steps using automation to build a single, scalable process. 

  1. Project scope definition: what is in and out of scope, assets, users, applications etc
  2. Inventory: how many applications, devices, end users?
  3. Application analysis: categorization
  4. Application readiness, conversion and testing: converting existing applications where applicable
  5. Automated ring assignment and readiness checks: understanding what is ready for migration
  6. Global scheduling and automated communication co-ordination: communication with end users / app owners
  7. Automated deployment and reporting: scheduling and automating deployment. 

Intune Migration Best Practice Webinar_7 Steps

This framework combines the automated capabilities of Dashworks Workplace Automation Platform with AppM application testing and packaging to provide a cohesive single migration process to help every organization remove the complexity of a Microsoft Intune migration. And the best bit is the benefits:

  • 97% faster than manual application testing and packaging
  • Saves 20 hours per application with automated packaging
  • 40% lower project costs in less than 30 days with automation
  • Saves 1 to 5 hours per application with automated testing.

The Delight Is In The Detail

So, we mentioned that this single process combines both the project and application management sides of the migration. We achieve this by utilizing and integrating Juriba's tools. So, let's start with more detail on the Dashworks and AppM features that can help when planning a Microsoft Intune migration.

Every migration starts with a project scope definition: what is in and out of scope, assets, users, applications etc. When starting the migration, Dashworks acts as a robust data warehouse for the project, allowing users to understand the environment showing the relationships of device and owner fully and clearly, devices and applications, for example.

It provides the template to scope the project, including: 

  • Which device is a suitable candidate or in scope for migration?
  • What are the application readiness criteria?
  • Categorizing and prioritizing the applications, ie IntuneWin wrapper or MSIX
  • Automated application re-packaging and conversion
  • Platform-based smoke testing and manual UAT
  • Setting the migration rings
  • Grouping users and devices for self-service scheduling
  • Reporting on migration success and upcoming schedules.

This initial stage establishes a working framework based on set parameters and creates a real-time dashboard to monitor and manage the migration. Users benefit from quickly seeing what devices are in scope, what is assigned to each ring and what the current readiness status is for migration. It also flags if and why a device may not be ready for migration due to a failing application and proactively remediates it using AppM workflow integration.

Once the application has been uploaded into AppM, it can be quickly converted into the correct package format, ready for migration. The newly formatted application can be tested to ensure it installs correctly in the new build environment via a virtual machine (smoke test – check content, check install, test results, and uninstall) – running unattended, within minutes, and with all testing logs recorded.

Now that the application packaging and testing have been completed, the Microsoft Intune migration project resumes in Dashworks, focusing on communication to both the application owner for UAT and the end user for deployment via the self-service portal. Watch our product demonstration capturing this workflow on-demand here

Don’t Just Take Our Word For It 

It's clear from talking to many of our customers that converting and testing applications in an automated fashion will be far quicker than the traditional process of communicating with application owners, provisioning virtual machines, and waiting until they test and sign off. Organizations also benefit from the ability to orchestrate and automate the deployments when things turn green, ring planning and having the tools to accelerate application prioritization.

“We’re working with an enterprise customer now, who needs to have an application portfolio repackaged for Microsoft Intune. During a recent discussion, they told us how they could see the scale of the work required was enormous and a large logistical undertaking. They were actively looking for ways to automate the work involved. We offered to partner with them and use AppM to convert 100 of their applications to help reduce the workload on the team. They were surprised at how little time it took to convert the applications they chose into the IntuneWin format and are eager to now use AppM as part of their business-as-usual packaging process. It’s a real time saver and unblocks their packaging bottleneck”. - Juriba Project Team

In Summary

We are excited about sharing what is essentially an entire end-to-end single migration process and modern framework from the Microsoft Intune migration plans, setting up a project, converting applications (IntuneWin, MSIX, publishing straight from the existing SCCM package), being able to test applications within the platform and being able to determine which assets are ready for migration, communicating with end users and application owners, and ultimately being able to orchestrate the deployment in an automated fashion. That’s an awful lot we can help with right? 

We hope you’ve found this an interesting read on the process behind migrating to Microsoft Intune and what's involved for your organization. If you are interested in learning more about how automated tooling for the entire end-to-end process really can help you accelerate and run a successful Microsoft Intune migration – minus the screw ups - fill in the form below and schedule a personalized 60-minute product demonstration of Dashworks and AppM with one of our experts.

PP Coming Soon MS Intune-26