Hello Reader,

It's time for your next Microsoft 365 Management Tip! Lately, I've been spending a lot of time working in Microsoft Intune and deploying various aspects of Microsoft Intune for some of my clients. Those deployments have led to this month's management tip around building a software inventory.

💡A Microsoft 365 Management Tip: Create a software inventory!

Microsoft Intune can be used for deploying applications to your users' devices. But what applications do you need to deploy? Usually, IT has a good idea of everything that is installed (or should be installed), but what if your users are local admins and install their own software? Or what if you forgot about some one-off software that was installed on a handful of devices?

The first thing I recommend to a lot of clients, is before you go too far down the path of planning your Intune deployment and software installations, first, let's get these devices enrolled in Intune. Don't worry about app packages, configuration policies, or compliance policies. All of that can come later...for now, let's just get them enrolled. This can go a long way in helping you get an inventory of your devices, their configuring AND the applications installed. Once you get the device enrolled, give it a day or two, then go look at "Discovered apps" for your enrolled device and you'll see a screen like this.

In fact, you can even write a PowerShell script to run against the Microsoft Graph to loop through all your devices, pull this information in a CSV (or database) to do an evaluation of the software and versions installed across all the enrolled devices in your organization. This goes a long way in getting you started in planning your app deployment (or if your users with admin access are behaving).

So back to Intelligink updates,

• 🎉 We just wrapped up a 3-part podcast series on Microsoft Intune (are you seeing a theme here?). It's Episode 371, Episode 372, and Episode 373.
• I have a FREE webinar coming up on 3/5 in partnership with Redmond Mag, "Best Practices for Managing & Optimizing Microsoft 365". Feel free to sign up and join me over there!

🗞️ Microsoft 365 news highlights (a little longer this week 😬)

• ​Microsoft 365 and Teams have been unbundled and are now to separate licenses. If you want Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 and Teams and you are purchasing new licenses, you now need to purchase two licenses. If you go look at the production page, now you see Microsoft 365 E3 (no Teams) as the product. They did lower the price (a little) and there is now a price to license Microsoft Teams Enterprise. The good news is that it sounds like if you already have a bundled license you can continue to renew that one (or increase the license count). Also, at least for now, it looks like those of us that are CSPs can also still purchase the bundled license.
• ​Microsoft Security Copilot is here (yes...I know...more Copilot). You can go purchase it and deploy it today, and yes It is expensive. I was hoping for a bit cheaper, and some of the initial news ($4/hr./Security Compute Unit) made it sound like if you don't use it much, you would just have to pay when you did. As I read it, it appears to be $4/hr./SCU minimum, ~ $2880/month and if you need more SCUs you can scale up, but it isn't just $4/hr./SCU only billed when Copilot is used. All that being said, if you want to check it out (and can afford it) it is a cool offering.

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Thank you all, and have a great day!

Ben Stegink

Helping you become a Microsoft 365 Expert!

P.S. Would you be interested in working with me as your coach to become the go-to Microsoft 365 expert at your company?

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