I’ve had lots of conversations with customers about Hybrid Azure AD Join, as it’s used as part of a key Windows Autopilot scenario. But it seems this leads to a bunch of […]
Michael Niehaus
Inside Windows Autopilot user-driven Hybrid Azure AD Join

I already talked about user-driven mode with Azure AD Join – that’s the easiest scenario. Now let’s talk about user-driven mode with Hybrid Azure AD Join. For those who have no idea […]
Using MFA with Azure AD Join

Here’s an easy one to try. In Azure AD, you can enable an option to require MFA before a user can join a device to Azure AD: When not using ADFS or […]
Options for Terms of Use

Some organizations want to display a “terms of use” page to users when the join or enroll in the organization. (Personally, I think this is a bit silly, but if it makes […]
CSP partners: Add devices to Windows Autopilot using Partner Center and PowerShell

I’ve given presentations at a variety of events that included this slide, talking about the different mechanisms that are available for registering devices with Windows Autopilot: For customers, you can register devices […]
Automatically setting up OneDrive for Business via Intune

The OneDrive for Business team has made a number of changes to support automatic configuration of OneDrive, including support for automatically signing in, configuring known folder migration, enabling offline files, and more. […]
Inside Windows Autopilot user-driven mode with Azure AD join

We’ve already talked about device registration and the initial Windows Autopilot profile download. That’s all prep work for the “real” provisioning process performed by Windows Autopilot. Now let’s look at the provisioning […]
TPM Attestation: What can possibly go wrong?

First off, it would be good to touch on what TPM attestation is, and then talk about why you care. From some older Windows Server documentation, here’s a decent overview: With TPM […]
What happens when a Windows Autopilot-registered device starts up?

The last time, I talked about the device registration process – preparing for deploying a device using Windows Autopilot. This time, I want to switch to the device itself and explore what […]
Self-serving post: Follow my blog from Outlook
If you are like me, you live and breathe through Outlook – it’s the center of my work world, enabling me to rapidly sift through obscene amounts of e-mail effectively. (You might […]
Which Intune portal do you use?

Update 2020/07/08: The https://devicemanagement.microsoft.com portal should now be accessed via https://endpoint.microsoft.com. This site is identical to the previous one, just with a new URL. That might seem like an odd question, but […]
What happens when you register a device with Windows Autopilot?

Let’s assume that you are registering a new VM, or some existing device that you want to use for validating Windows Autopilot. (New devices should be registered by the OEM, distributor, or […]
Disk Deduplication: A great feature for lab environments

I have a reasonably powerful workstation that I’ve been using for testing and validation for many years, an HP z800 Workstation with 8 CPU cores, 96GB of RAM, and 4TB of disk […]
Configuring company branding in Azure AD

As you may know, Windows Autopilot leverages Azure AD company branding to show custom logos and text during the Azure AD authentication/join process. I described how this company branding information was used […]
Using UE-V with Windows Autopilot
When we talk about what it takes to get a device ready for productive use, we generally include OneDrive for Business for ensuring that files and folders are automatically synced to the […]
More on Windows Autopilot for existing devices
With any luck, you saw this morning’s blog post talking about Windows Autopilot for existing devices. In that blog, I talked about how this didn’t require any client-side changes to support joining […]
Starting again…
I’ve been blogging since 2006 on my original Microsoft blog. But you might have noticed an exodus from that blog site, with a move to the Tech Community site or one of […]