In the past 12-18 months, the adoption of Microsoft Intune has increased exponentially while the market share for Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Formerly ConfigMgr or SCCM) is decreasing. This article and the video below will explore the paths available for organizations migrating to Microsoft Intune, what’s involved throughout this process, and how Juriba’s automated application and device management can help accelerate you along the journey.
In the past, we have discussed how running a successful Microsoft Intune migration is undoubtedly complex and comes with challenges. It requires a well-thought-out strategy and careful consideration and planning on how to approach the migration, adoption of the right tools and processes, and organizational buy-in from key people across the business. Oh, and yes, it also needs to be achieved in a way that saves time, resources, and budget, yet runs parallel to business as usual with no disruption.
Many experts and organizations agree that moving end user assets 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 is that many will adopt a co-managed estate using the best parts of Microsoft Intune and MECM (formerly SCCM) because Intune is a maturing toolset compared with the vastly functional MECM.
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: understanding your existing inventory - this can be difficult as data is held across multiple systems and is often inaccurate, identifying whether your applications need work before they can be migrated, and knowing how to organize the work to ensure minimal 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 business-as-usual IT and migration programs. We have 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 focused 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 with application readiness usually being 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 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.
Juriba simplifies this migration process by integrating with existing systems to ensure the data for applications and devices is accurate and up to date and automating the process in a single workflow.
Here, we share with you a framework that we have built. It moves through the Microsoft Intune migration in 7 simple steps, using automation to build a single, scalable process.
- Project scope definition: what is in and out of scope, assets, users, applications, etc.
- Inventory: how many applications, devices and end users?
- Application analysis: categorization
- Application readiness, conversion, and testing: converting existing applications where applicable
- Automated ring assignment and readiness checks: understanding what is ready for migration
- Global scheduling and automated communication co-ordination: communication with end users/app owners
- Automated deployment and reporting: scheduling and automating deployment
This framework uses the automated capabilities of Juriba's Digital Platform Conductor (DPC) and App Readiness suite of solutions 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 through process automation
- Saves 1 to 5 hours per application with automated testing
Ready your devices and applications in one place
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 Juriba DPC and App Readiness suite of solutions 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, Juriba acts as a robust data warehouse for the project, allowing users to understand the environment by showing the relationships between devices and owners and 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, i.e. 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 App Readiness workflow integration.
Once the application has been uploaded, 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, including video documentation. The smoke test checks for packages that don't run, are missing dependencies, or don't have what they need, etc., so that when the package is installed, it works as expected.
Without Juriba, each application would need to be installed, run, smoke tested, uninstalled, prepared for Intune, etc., manually. Juriba replaces this tedious and time-consuming process and also eliminates human error/oversight.
Now that the application packaging and testing have been completed, the Microsoft Intune migration project resumes in Juriba's. It will focus 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 is 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, accelerating application prioritization.
“We’re currently working with an enterprise customer who needs to have an application portfolio repackaged for Microsoft Intune. The scale and complexity of the work meant their team would be unable to manage it and they needed a way to to automate the work involved. We have already converted over 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 now using Juriba 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 MECM package), being able to test applications within Juriba 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?
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 - simply fill in the form below to talk with one of our team of experts.
