Microsoft Intune

[chrisaroz]

Microsoft is getting into systems management? This could be interesting...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20002690-56.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/default.aspx

 

[kagman]

Thanks for the heads up. One question. They only talk about windows 7 pcs. I hope it can run under vista and xp.. Going to try it out now..

 

[iptech]

The Windows Intune client software is supported on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of:

* Windows 7 Enterprise, Ultimate, and Professional
* Windows Vista® Enterprise, Ultimate, and Business
* Windows XP Professional with Service Pack (SP) 2; SP3 (recommended)

 

[iisjman07]

Looks nice ............

 

[ProTech-MN]

Interesting... Not quite sure what to think about this yet...

Hopefully they won't implement this like the have their BPOS offering, but I suspect they will...

-Randy

 

[wimwauters]

Thanks for the heads up. One question. They only talk about windows 7 pcs. I hope it can run under vista and xp.. Going to try it out now..

I think M$ would be advising to upgrade to 7...

also note this is aimed at enterprise customers.

 

[ProTech-MN]

I think M$ would be advising to upgrade to 7...

also note this is aimed at enterprise customers.

Yea, I expect a big push to Windows 7 again from MS... curious as to when the XP downgrade option will finally go away...

I don't consider this an enterprise product though... more like SMB's probably... 25 to 400-500 PC range perhaps. The big guys all have the tools provided by inTune already in place and have the staff to support them, as well as the budget.

-Randy

 

[COB]

From looking at the pricing it may work out to be quite expensive if done at the small business level. It is interesting however to have a dashboard for controlling security, antivirus and software updates. Especially the software updates.

 

[ProTech Support]

I am going to give this a test drive. Has anybody else started working with it?

 

[Cybjun]

I've been trying intune for a few days now, I'm not really thrilled with it. login errors to the console, It doesn't seem to intergrate well with existing security software and 11 per pc is unreasonable

 

[ProTech-MN]

I've been trying intune for a few days now, I'm not really thrilled with it. login errors to the console, It doesn't seem to intergrate well with existing security software and 11 per pc is unreasonable

The biggest issue I have with MS's push into the SaaS market with products such as inTune and Office 365, is that THEY control the customer billing and partners just get a small commission (12% for the initial sale and 6% recurring or something similar IIRC). You have to sell ALOT of these seats for any worthwhile return. Also, MS is (or will be) selling all this stuff directly to customers as well, so now they're directly competing with their own partners - what's to prevent them from squeezing smaller partners out all together down the road? What happens when a customer get's a free year of Office 365 with every new Dell or HP computer they purchase?

There's been a lot of discussion and concern in the MS partner community about this and like many partners, I'm still on the fence with this and am watching closely to how this plays out...

-Randy

 

[Cybjun]

The biggest issue I have with MS's push into the SaaS market with products such as inTune and Office 365, is that THEY control the customer billing and partners just get a small commission (12% for the initial sale and 6% recurring or something similar IIRC). You have to sell ALOT of these seats for any worthwhile return. Also, MS is (or will be) selling all this stuff directly to customers as well, so now they're directly competing with their own partners - what's to prevent them from squeezing smaller partners out all together down the road? What happens when a customer get's a free year of Office 365 with every new Dell or HP computer they purchase?

There's been a lot of discussion and concern in the MS partner community about this and like many partners, I'm still on the fence with this and am watching closely to how this plays out...

-Randy

Microsoft may sell it directly to customers but it still needs someone that understands what its monitoring and reporting to administer it. Put I use Proactive watch and its a lot cheaper per PC and even per Server then 11 per seat that Microsoft wants & I can bill it into my managed service agreement instead of Microsoft billing the client directly