Microsoft announced a new feature in Intune 2405 release that they call Device Staging.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/enrollment/device-staging-overview
This feature is in according to Microsoft hopes to reduce the amount of time it takes for a end-user to do the initial setup on their Android Enterprise device if they are either enrolled as:
Android Enterprise corporate-owned fully managed
Android Enterprise corporate-owned work profile
How much reduction are there for an end-user ?
Testing was performed with 2 Samsung Xcover 5 both running One UI 6.0 with Android 14 with June 2024 Security patches.
Lets have a look at how much reduction there actually are when it comes to the end-user experience. What to keep in mind is that this reduction comes at a cost of someone else doing the initial setup, like for example Autopilot Pre-provisioning (Formely known as White Glove) that we have on Windows devices. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/autopilot/pre-provision
Corporate-owned fully managed scenario
Lets go through the steps that the admin/3rd party would go through before delivering the device to the end-user.
Once they admin/3rd party got to the home screen they would probably want it to sit there for a while to make sure the device got all policies and apps that’s required. From there they would power off the device and delivery it to the end-user.
At this time, in the Intune console the device would be named “staging_”
This name would be present until the end-user logs in to the company portal with their credentials.
End-user
The end-user would get their new device and start it for the first time. This time however they would be presented directly to the homescreen of the device and they would be instructed to open up the Intune app on the phone to finalize the onboarding.
Device is now ready for use and it will automatically change the device name in the Intune portal.
What happens if you rename the device before a user has signed in to the device ?
One thing I was curious about was the question that was presented in the headline here. Reason for asking that question is that for some organization there are automatic jobs that renames the device as soon as it joins Intune. Would that cause any issues or create a situation where the device would not rename per design of this implementation from Microsoft ?
So I tested it, I renamed the device that was just enrolled but no user had logged on yet.
As seen here, the new name is present in Intune “Test Rename”
But once the user signed in to Company portal, the devices was renamed as expected by the feature. This however might in certain scenarios mess with the naming if you have jobs running that automatically renames new devices and you don’t take in consideration that this Microsoft feature also does it.
That’s it for this time, Don’t forget to follow me on X (twitter) @timmyitdotcom , BlueSky @timmyit.com or connect with me on LinkedIn