Part 4 – Improve user experience with Microsoft Endpoint Analytics: Recommended Software

This blog is part of a series of blog posts about Endpoint Analytics. In this 4th post we’ll continue with Recommended Software, which one of the four main pillars (Startup performance, Proactive Remediation, Recommended Software, Application Reliability) of Endpoint Analytics.

As mentioned before, Endpoint Analytics improve user productivity and reduces IT support costs by providing insights into the user experience. The insights enable IT to optimize the end-user experience with proactive support and to detect regressions to the user experience by assessing user impact of configuration changes.

Independent of your hardware estate, which may very per organization, there are a number of fundamental principles underpinning to achieve an optimal score with Endpoint Analytics. Your hardware, applications & services largely determines how end users experiences their workplace. With new hardware, imperfections can go unnoticed without negative effect, however as hardware ages, this will change and become more tangible.

Therefore it’s important to have your fundamentals in order. But what do we mean by this? In order to guarantee an optimal functioning workplace, a number of preconditions must be in place which forms the foundation.

• Windows 10 (percent of devices running Windows 10)
• Cloud Identity (percent of device registered in Azure AD)
• Cloud Management (percent of devices enrolled in Intune)
• Windows Autopilot (percent of devices enrolled in Autopilot)

Understanding score measurement

Endpoint Analytics computes the Software adoption score for all your Intune and co-managed devices, regardless of whether they’ve been configured with the Intune data collection policy or not. For Configuration Manager-managed devices, scores are only computed for enrolled devices.

Windows 10

Windows 10 was developed with modern management at its core. It’s designed to be managed anywhere, whether connected to a corporate network or out on the clear internet. Wherever the device is connected, the device is managed. Support for modern management is baked right into the operating system – so no additional agents are required.

If you’re on Windows 10, then you’re already benefitting from Windows-as-a-Service and its regular security and feature updates. Moving your device management to the Cloud means that you’ll similarly benefit from any new improvements and updates Microsoft make to Microsoft Endpoint Manager automatically. Therefore no doubt Windows 10 provides a better user experience than older versions of Windows. This metric measures the percent of devices on Windows 10 versus an older version of Windows.

There a various strategies moving to Windows 10, if you haven’t already migrated to windows 10. With Windows 10, you can continue to use traditional OS deployment, but you can also “manage out of the box.” To transform new devices into fully-configured, fully-managed devices, you can:

• Avoid reimaging by using dynamic provisioning, enabled by a cloud-based device management services such as Windows Autopilot or Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
• Use traditional imaging techniques such as deploying custom images using Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager.

Another good starting point for moving devices from older versions of Windows is to create a deployment plan using Desktop Analytics.

Windows Autopilot

Microsoft Autopilot provides a simpler initial provisioning experience for Windows 10 PCs than the native experience by reducing the number of screens in the Out Of Box Experience (OOBE) and providing defaults, to ensure the employees device is correctly provisioning from the factory or on reset.

This metric measures the percent of Windows 10 devices that are registered for Autopilot. The recommended remediation action is to register existing devices in Autopilot using Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Cloud Identity

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) provides users with numerous productivity benefits including device-wide single sign-on to apps and services, Windows Hello for Business (Hybrid) sign-in, self-service BitLocker recovery, and corporate data roaming with Enterprise State Roaming. This metric measures the percent of devices enrolled in Azure AD.

Your Microsoft Endpoint Manager managed devices are already enrolled in Azure AD. The recommended remediation action for devices managed by Configuration Manager is to either enroll them in Azure AD (Hybrid Azure AD Joined) and co-manage them. Co-managing devices also improves your cloud management score.

Cloud Management

Microsoft Endpoint Manager provides users with several productivity benefits, including enabling access to corporate resources even when they are away from the corporate network, and eliminates the need for and performance overhead of Group Policy, resulting in a better end-user experience. This metric measures the percent of PCs enrolled in Microsoft Endpoint Manager. See how Microsoft is enabling this for our employees.

The recommended remediation action for devices managed by Configuration Manager that aren’t yet enrolled in Endpoint Manager is to co-manage them.

Doing the math

Certain software is known to improve the end-user experience, independent of lower-level health metrics. For example, Windows 10 has a much higher Net Promoter score than Windows 7. The Software adoption score is a number between 0 and 100 that represents a weighted average of the percent of devices that have deployed various recommended software. The current weighting is higher for Windows than for the other metrics since users interact with them more often.

Endpoint Analytics series

In a series of blog posts I’ll show you the possibilities of endpoint analytics, where to start, how does it works and most important to get the most out of it for your end-users and (IT) organization. Stay tuned!

• Part 1 – Improve endpoint user experience with Microsoft Endpoint Analytics: A first impression!
• Part 2 – Improve endpoint user experience with Microsoft Endpoint Analytics: Start-up Performance
• Part 3 – Improve endpoint user experience with Microsoft Endpoint Analytics: Proactive Remediation
• Part 4 – Improve endpoint user experience with Microsoft Endpoint Analytics: Recommended Software
• Part 5 – Improve endpoint user experience with Microsoft Endpoint Analytics: Application Reliability & Device Restarts

Sources

Recommended software in Endpoint Analytics https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/analytics/recommended-software