A new release of Microsoft's Windows Intune is now available according to the Windows Intune Team Blog. Microsoft debuted Intune, a hosted service used to secure and manage PCs via the cloud, on March 23 this year.
The latest release delivers some new enhancements and capabilities, including enhanced reporting. Increased hardware reporting capabilities gives users information on how many desktops versus laptops are deployed in an organization and insight into individual machine statistics such as if any PC is running low on disk space. Additionally, users can import volume licensing information into reports.
The purportedly biggest change is the ability for IT to upload and install software remotely to client machines via Intune. In the previous version of Intune, this capability was limited to Microsoft products such as Office, but has been expanded to include almost all third-party applications and was the feature most requested by Intune customers and beta testers, according to Eric Main, the Director of Windows Intune Product Management.
Remote tasks, without requiring any user intervention as well as the ability for Intune administrators to grant read-only access to the administrator's console, are other new features.
While there has been no information provided as to whether Intune will eventually be able to manage Windows 8 clients, Microsoft is promoting upgrades to Windows 7 from XP. A Windows 7 enterprise license is provided with each Intune license, enabling organizations to move from XP—in preparation for Microsoft's official end of support for XP in April 2014.
The latest Intune release will start rolling out to currently subscribed customers in the following weeks. Microsoft anticipates completing customer updates by the end of the year. Customers will see an alert displayed in the Windows Intune administrator console two weeks prior to receiving the update informing the exact date and time the update will occur.
Windows Intune beta customers will have to sign up again once the beta concludes on Nov. 17. These customers and any new Intune users will have access to the latest version at sign-up.