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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Microsoft Windows Intune is a cloud service solution that simplifies how small and mid-sized businesses manage and secure PCs using Microsoft cloud services and Windows 7óso your computers and users can operate at peak performance all the time.This step-by-step guide will show you how to plan, set up and maintain Windows Intune, showing you how to manage a group of PCs (either 1 business or several if a partner) from the base operating system, through to the patches, anti-malware solution and deployed software and policies from a central console, using the Windows Intune service. This book takes you through all the steps to plan, set up and maintain Windows Intune and how to manage a group of PCs. The book starts by providing an overview of Cloud Computing and PC Management. The book then dives into topics such as Windows Intune features, signing up for Windows Intune and installing the client software, configuring Windows Intune, proactive management, and monitoring and dealing with alerts, including remote assistance amongst others. As Windows 7 is part of Windows Intune, the book will also cover the minimum steps required to move from Windows XP to Windows 7 while keeping user settings and preferences.
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Seitenzahl: 269
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Table of Contents
Microsoft Windows Intune 2.0: Quickstart Administration
Microsoft Windows Intune 2.0: Quickstart Administration
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: January 2012
Production Reference: 1170112
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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Cover Image by Meir Jacob (<[email protected]> )
Credits
Author
David Overton
Reviewers
Richard Diver
Robert Pearman
Jason Wallace
Andy Trish
Acquisition Editor
Kerry George
Lead Technical Editor
Susmita Panda
Technical Editors
Kedar Bhat
Priyanka Shah
Naheed Shaikh
Project Coordinator
Jovita Pinto
Proofreader
Stephen Swaney
Indexer
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Graphics
Valentina Joseph D'Silva
Manu Joseph
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
David Overton has been in the IT industry for over 25 years and has worked at Microsoft, in the UK, for more than eleven years. David fell in love with Small and Medium Business when he was given responsibility for engaging with journalists, at the time of the launch of Small Business Server 2003, in the UK. He has also written Small Business Server 2008 Installation, Migration and Configuration. For the next four years, David was responsible for improving SBS deliveries by Microsoft partners.
David has since moved on to other roles within Microsoft but still continues work with a number of small and medium businesses and Microsoft partners. David's role at Microsoft includes working with organizations that are moving towards cloud-based computing models. He personally became involved with the Windows Intune product, as a result. Working with both the UK and US teams, in his role there, has lead to the writing of this book.
Besides his day job, David is also a writer; he has written for consumer publications and Windows XP and Windows Vista magazines, and he blogs at http://davidoverton.com, where he helps readers fi nd solutions to questions and problems. In 2009, David published his fi rst book on SBS 2008, which was well received.
When not working or writing, David likes to spend time with his family and also tries to fi t in sailing, at any time of the year, in any weather.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank all those around me who have inspired me to undertake another book to help others. My wife and daughters are incredibly generous with what would be our time together, allowing me to borrow it to write. My father, who is always asking me why things do and don't work and what can be done to fix them. Friends and colleagues have provided feedback, honestly, that has helped shape the book with their insight and differing opinions, enabling it to answer more questions and provide more useful insight.
Finally, I want to thank and remember my mum. She taught me to chase my dreams, no matter how diffi cult they may be. My mum got to see my fi rst book published and to see this one start, but was not there, in the end, to see this book arrive in its fi nished form. I hope she looks down at me from wherever she is and is as proud of me as I am of her. I will miss you, mum, and your support for my projects, such as this book. For this reason, I dedicate this book to you, for all the love, knowledge, and strength you have given me.
About the Reviewers
Richard Diver is a passionate technologist with over 10 years' experience in Enterprise level IT systems. Having worked his way up from helpdesk to server team, and from consultant to architect, Richard has worked on many large-scale projects and gained a wide breadth of knowledge in technology, people, and process.
During his time at Microsoft, Richard developed technical content and training courses in Windows Server Performance, Sysinternals Tools, and Personal Productivity, delivering this to internal audiences and customers. He is currently working as an Enterprise Architect for Methods Consulting, a London-based consultancy specializing in the Public Sector.
Richard has recently completed the review of the latest book Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference by Mark Russinovich, and has completed the creation of an accompanying training course that is now being delivered by Microsoft Engineers to their Premier customers.
Andy Trish is an ex-military man with two war medals. He came into the IT world in 1999 and has since gained over 60 Microsoft Certifi ed Professional qualifi cations in a whole variety of subjects. He has recently written the questions and answers for some of the new Microsoft exams. He has held the title of Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2008 and contributed to developing the Microsoft Partner Network.
Andy has presented at five Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conferences and a variety of other events, globally.
He was the Founding Director of NCI Technologies, based in Cornwall, that won the Microsoft OEM Hardware Reseller of the Year, 2011 award and was fi nalist for Microsoft Midmarket Provider of the Year, 2011. He has grown the company to a staff of twenty-eight, in just seven years.
Andy also co-authored Thinking of Maximising Your Investment as a Microsoft Partner? Ask the Smart Questions, with Julie Simpson.
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Preface
Microsoft Windows Intune is a cloud service solution that simplifies how small and mid-sized businesses manage and secure PCs using Microsoft cloud services and Windows 7—so your computers and users can operate at peak performance all the time.
This step-by-step guide will show you how to plan, set up, and maintain Windows Intune, showing you how to manage a group of PCs (either one business or several) from the base operating system, through to the patches, anti-malware solution and deployed software and policies from a central console, using the Windows Intune service.
This book takes you through all the steps to plan, set up and maintain Windows Intune and how to manage a group of PCs. The book starts by providing an overview of cloud computing and PC management. The book then dives into topics such as Windows Intune features, signing up for Windows Intune and installing the client software, configuring Windows Intune, proactive management, and monitoring and dealing with alerts, including remote assistance among others. As Windows 7 is part of Windows Intune, the book will also cover the minimum steps required to move from Windows XP to Windows 7 while keeping user settings and preferences.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Overview of Cloud Computing, explores the new cloud computing and cloud-based services world that we are moving rapidly towards and includes Windows Intune. Before we can embark on this journey it is important that we understand the benefits and pitfalls that cloud services bring with them and how they apply to us. One mechanism to help protect us against the uncertainties is the use of Service Level Agreements, which are explained for Windows Intune.
Chapter 2, Introduction to PC Management Concepts, introduces the important concepts behind PC management, with a focus on ensuring that the needs of the business are the fundamental driver of the IT policy we implement with Windows Intune. We then explore how the IT policy decisions are taken to reflect these needs and are then able to demonstrate that they are delivering on them.
Chapter 3, Overview of Windows Intune Features, describes the features within Windows Intune, ensuring that we can take advantage of all of the benefits it has to offer, including anti-malware software, update management for both the Windows Operating System, and Windows applications, software distribution, system alerts and reporting.
Chapter 4, Signing Up for Windows Intune and Installing the Client Software, walks through the Microsoft Online Services Portal, configuring the service administrators, and if desired, assigning a partner to assist us. We also download and install the Windows Intune client software and ensure it is up and running on each computer.
Chapter 5, Configuring Windows Intune, runs through the configuration steps for Windows Intune. This starts by adding additional administrators to the system to allow multiple system’s managers. We then configure the computer groups for the management process. We enable the alerts that Windows Intune will raise and configure who they are sent to. Finally, we configure the Microsoft and non-Microsoft software license purchases so Windows Intune can report on compliance to this.
Chapter 6, Configuring Management Policy, enables us to construct the policies that Windows Intune uses to configure each computer. This covers firewall, anti-malware, and operating system and software updates. The Windows updates section includes configuring which update categories are checked on each computer to see if they are required and the deployment policy options, either manual or automatic approval.
Chapter 7, Software Deployment, using Windows Intune can be a complex process as all software must be installed silently and with all the files in one location. We explore the process, setting up the command switches and including the right files for a number of common applications as working examples.
Chapter 8, Tracking and Reporting, is a key activity to demonstrate that we are delivering a useful service. We explore the activities required to track the hardware and software managed by Windows Intune and then the reporting options for software use, alerts, and hardware tracking. Since custom reports are often desired, we also look at how these could be delivered into a spreadsheet and then enable greater insight if desired.
Chapter 9, Monitoring and Responding to Windows Intune Alerts, requires different responses depending on the alert and the level. We will examine how to monitor the computers and deal with the special case of remote assistance alerts that a user can request and require an almost immediate response due to the fact that someone is waiting for us.
Chapter 10, Resolve Problems Using Microsoft DaRT, is an optional purchase with Windows Intune that is delivered as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. It can be used to resolve deep technical issues that stop a computer booting or being accessed by a user. We will understand how we can repair a system, change passwords, and edit the devices configured on a computer. This is a critical for all IT desktop managers.
Chapter 11, Deploying Windows 7 Enterprise Edition, is something many of us will have to do and is made easier as Windows Intune includes the license required to update to the latest version of Windows. We will cover the process of migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 Enterprise Edition. This includes moving the user settings from one system to another and then updating Windows Intune.
Chapter 12, Integration with Existing Microsoft Products, is an area we explore as many of us will use Windows Intune with other Microsoft technologies. We examine how Window Intune interacts with other Microsoft products and whether they are a natural fit for use with Windows Intune.
What you need for this book
The requirements for Windows Intune are very simple. We need a group of Windows-based computers that we want to manage, access to the Internet, and a web browser that supports Microsoft Silverlight.
Who this book is for
If you are an administrator or partner who wants to plan, set up, and maintain Windows Intune and manage a group of PCs, then this book is for you. You should have a basic understanding of Windows administration, however, knowledge of Windows Intune would not be required.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Type a group name, such as Office Licenses."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "If you want the user to have full permissions, select Full access, otherwise select Read-only access".
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Chapter 1. Overview of Cloud Computing
Welcome to the cloud computing revolution currently sweeping through the IT landscape. It might be slightly confusing as to why we are starting a book on PC management with an introduction to cloud computing, however, the management service you are signing up for is a cloud based solution, with benefits and challenges that need to be addressed and planned for.
Through this chapter we will understand what cloud computing is and how it compares to the traditional on-premise computing models of today. We will then discuss what this means to us when relying on the Windows Intune Service and highlight other cloud computing services that we might want to use, or perhaps already be using from the cloud.
The one word of warning that I will give here is that every IT company on the planet appears to have a definition of cloud computing that suits the products they sell. Here, we will define the key aspects that are required for something to be a cloud computing solution.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
We are going to cheat a little. I'm not going to provide one of those quotable definitions of cloud computing, but rather explain what I believe are the key facets of cloud computing and how these benefit us and provide us with caution in some areas. The reason I'm going to do this is because I recently saw a presentation by a UK government official that stated they had found twenty-two definitions of cloud computing and none of these definitions fitted their needs, so they defined number twenty-three. No doubt I will upset some in the IT world with my information, but that is one of the luxuries of being the author, although I think this aligns with most of the twenty-three definitions to date.
The key facets of a cloud solution are as follows:
There are other facets that are often part of a cloud solution, but not required and we shall also explore these:
What should not be ignored is that all of the these facets could be delivered on our premises, especially if the delivery is for a large organization. However, the economies of scale and shared fixed costs that trend to zero are limited by our own ability to scale. Some would call this on-premise solution a private cloud, while others would call it a well-managed data center with many aspects shared with a historic well-run mainframes estate. As a side note, my computing life started with mainframes and it makes me smile that a mainframe expert would see almost all of the key facets of a cloud solution as those by which mainframe based solutions were delivered from private data centers.
This is one of the key things to understand here. While Internet scalability enables a lower cost model and the protocols are becoming more manageable even with our firewalls that protect our networks as they connect to the Internet, there is very little here that by itself is new. The uniqueness here is that organizations like Microsoft are investing billions of dollars to build the data centers and solutions that bring each facet together into a handful of locations at a game changing price point.
Centralized solution, management, and upgrades
Given that a cloud service is normally provided over the Internet, for scale, the solution will be located in a handful of data centers owned and managed by the service provider. They will provide everything we need to run the solution, from physical servers to networking and application software; however we are not be able to directly access this. We use the interfaces they provide for the services and the service provider manipulates hardware, software, and configures the network for us. The key thing is that it is a highly replicated solution that has a level of management that is taken care of for you. The different cloud computing models and what is managed for you, versus by you, will be discussed later in this chapter.
The following diagram demonstrates the items that could move from a distributed to a centralized solution with cloud services. We can see that with a centralized solution, more resources are required in an IT function rather than repeated in each department. While the boxes are not drawn to scale, we should get economies of scale as things are centralized. Centralization can take place on our premises or using a cloud services provider where some of the IT functions in the diagram are, in effect, outsourced to the cloud service provider.
With Windows Intune, all the information about each Windows computer is centrally stored in multiple Microsoft data centers and can be managed by us, no matter whether a server, the network, or even the entire data center fails. The application that runs on this infrastructure is the Windows Intune management software and it is maintained and upgraded without needing to be involved in the process. We will also have client software that connects to this infrastructure that is provided by Windows Intune, but the installation onto each client computer still falls to us to manage. When we make a change using the management tools at the data center, this will automatically be distributed out to the client computers provided they are connected to the Internet, implementing our changes without having to visit or touch these machines.
While Windows Intune centralizes the management function, storage and applications are still provided in the same way as previously delivered.
Elastic in scale and power
The Internet is a big place and the demands on services can be tiny or massive and this is expected to change over time, sometimes within minutes. A cloud solution should have that flexibility built into it. When we deliver computing resources in our own offices or data center, we have to buy the right number of servers and storage to enable us to meet the peak demand. Probably, because it is too complex to do anything else, most organizations simply leave these servers on all the time, consuming electricity, but adding no value to the business. In a cloud environment, servers are started and stopped as needed to deliver the solution, often by the service provider on our behalf. We can see all the opportunities that an elastic service can simply scale up or be turned off according to our business needs in the following diagram:
In the case of Windows Intune, this is the application that Microsoft manages and they start up and stop the servers as required to deliver the information to the Windows Intune client software on the PCs and the management interfaces.
Pricing based on utilization
There are two elements to the pricing of cloud solutions that need to be discussed. The first is that by virtue of the elastic number of servers used, the cost of the service is lower than purchasing for peak capacity. The second is that rather than paying for servers, power, cooling, storage, and people, we now pay for utility. This may be a fee per user, compute hour, storage, and so on, but it is nothing like the traditional buy or lease models for IT where we paid for the hardware and software rather than usage.
The low fee we pay for Windows Intune relates to the fact that the service is delivered at Internet scale with elastic scalability that means that the actual computing required is right sized for all the users of the service at any moment. Our usage would be a fraction of the IT required to deliver ourselves because we do not actively interact with the management system 100% of the time. Beyond the scalability, Microsoft is also able to deliver greater efficiencies in managing the whole solution. This enables Microsoft to charge a flat rate per user for the services that is lower than the cost of acquiring the software, hardware, and people to manage by a significant amount.
Delivered using Internet protocols
Protocols describe the way machines talk to each other. Some of these are defined by standards bodies and others are known as de-facto standards as they have been popularized by the organization or organizations that use them. Either way, they need to be Internet friendly so that they can be routed, inspected and secured by firewalls and received by different client device types where appropriate.
Windows Intune uses a combination of standards based and de-facto standards, but all the protocols are published and known, enabling routing and securing via the Internet. Windows Intune uses a standard web browser to deliver the management interfaces and then a well-known set of protocols to deliver the rest of the information to the client PCs.
The term Cloud is often used when describing solutions that are often hosted and certainly connected to over the Internet. What used to be an Internet service is now often referred to as a Cloud service, but the terms are often interchangeable.
Secure and private
The final technical facet that all cloud services should have relates to security and privacy. The service needs to be as trustworthy as if we were running it ourselves. This means that our data is not shared or leaked, and that the communication protocols are secure. This is often not something we can test, but we should look for a privacy statement from the service provider.
Windows Intune's privacy statement can be found by following the link: http://davidoverton.com/r.ashx?20.
Service Level Agreement
All quality cloud services should have a Service Level Agreement or SLA
