What is our primary use case?
Typically, for customers that tend to come from a transportation logistics background, it's essentially free or the TCO is literally non-existent. It's a good fit for our resume offerings. Anywhere between 50 to 200 users is a typical use case that we see, where they're leveraging the product for low subscription costs.
What is most valuable?
Its overall integration into Microsoft 365 is great.
I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management. Linkage to a single pane is probably the best benefit.
I'm looking at it in comparison to other EMMs and there are better EMMs out there. It's still for me at an MBM stage, as it's addressing other areas that make up EMM, however, if you put it in comparison to others, for instance, the overall experience is better. We get OL and DM and we get in the mobile threat detection. We get in a lot of other things into that EMM.
What needs improvement?
Intune, in their port description, for me is still pretty infantile. I will say in the next 18 months to two years, they'll start becoming a bit more major, I hope.
It's pretty straightforward to implement as long as you've got a Microsoft subscription. However, it's kind-of convoluted how they explain it and what you are paying for. Obviously, we know that the more money you pay, the more features you get. I think that they can lay it out a little bit better, sometimes it's pretty hard to follow what their offering actually is.
There's quite a lot of development that they can do within their Intune dashboard. I think there are too many lines hyperlinked to move you around. Others, in contrast, give you a simple dashboard and an intuitive administrative walkthrough.
The solution looks too technical. Even though it is a technical feature, it comes across as too technical to navigate through. They can certainly work on the overall dashboad and the layout, to simplify everything.
They can do a lot more with Enterprise Firmware over here to give it full support.
Coming from a Samsung perspective, they need to comprehensively support the Android provisioning methods.
For how long have I used the solution?
I’ve been using the solution for three years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
From a stability perspective yes, it's very stable. The SLA that Microsoft gives around their network, the cloud service offering, makes it very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's highly scalable. Anything that's in the cloud should come with scale, and in this case definitely a highly scalable option.
I'm not sure, in total, how many people are actually on the solution. With Samsung, there's no preferred EMM solution in place. Most of it tends to come down to local/regional preference. Each region's location has its own mobile provider or EMM provider. We don't manage Intune for ourselves or for customers. Therefore, within the business, I would say it's less than 5%. As I say, we have our own solution. Nobody's going to use Intune within Samsung and we have our own EMM. Therefore, I don't forsee us increasing usage.
How are customer service and technical support?
As we're consultants, we never rely upon a specific Microsoft consultancy to resolve anything and we clear our own testbed issues. We've very rarely been in contact with Microsoft's technical support. We're more engaged with Microsoft from a strategic partner level or in partnership as regards to our EMM offering. We have all the expertise we need in-house.
How was the initial setup?
The solution is cloud-oriented. As long as you have a valid Microsoft Enterprise Subscription, it's all subscription-driven. From an installation or deployment perspective, it's pretty quick and pretty straightforward. It's not complex. As long as you paid for at least a standard enterprise subscription.
What about the implementation team?
Where I am with Samsung, we're pre-sales. This is the customer's OMS. We're engaging with customers that have these environments in place, to then obviously bolt in our Samsung cloud solutions port. Obviously, we become consultancy on our cloud solutions. However, more so you have the engineering aspects of that.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For my area of business, we have a yearly subscription, which provides us with Intune capabilities within our test labs. It is negligible. It's pennies compared to our growth target. It's very affordable.
What other advice do I have?
I'm typically an Azure consultant. Therefore, anything on the Azure platform now obviously includes Intune from an EMM perspective.
We use a multitude of versions. I can't tell the specific numbers. We use many as we have to constantly compare against different customer environments. We have test labs that have multi-versions as well.
Predominantly, our deployment models are on the cloud. There's literally no call for on-premise at all, apart from network connectors.
I would advise users to consider the solution on a use case by use case. I personally work in a Samsung Android environment and there's a lot more feature support in other EMMs. Therefore, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. In the next 18 to 24 months, I hope that severe changes are made as Microsoft establishes itself more.
Overall, I would rate it at a seven out of ten. There's still a lot of room for improvement in how they deliver. Their products and features are pretty good, and they serve the need. They probably just need to work on their explanation and probably the layout and UI quite a bit more.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner