Conditional access

I have been working on conditional access rules this week in my test environment.  I am planning on trying to sell to my senior leadership a plan to move off traditional MDM and towards an Intune/MAM conditional access setup.

Some of the things I really like about conditional access is the ability to control all of the different client access.  I can lock it down to could application type, or domain user etc:

The only real problem I've come across is trying to sell this. It is such a huge change, and really requires all or nothing type approach.  We will see what the new year brings.

Skype PowerShell vs. Teams Powershell

I think it is really cool that a lot of the commands that I've learned from Skype Powershell can be used with teams. With teams being announced this year as being the defector replacement for Skype in the future, this will make the conversation a lot easier for people who already know a lot of these commands. Here is the repo https://github.com/microsoftdocs/office-docs-powershell

Intune has come so far

I have to admit, if like me you have been in the mobile device management space, you are fully aware that the old silverlight application was...trash.  They have done so much work on it, and integrated so many sign on features it is in my opinion the best option out there.  I have set up a few different systems now, and the ability to integrate so easily with the O365 stack is going to make it far away the best management system in the future.

The next question is, do you really need mobile device management? With conditional access, why does it matter if you control the device.

Intune Connector updated

Microsoft Intune Exchange connector (5.0.6175.0) was updated last week. I couldn't find any updates on what exactly it did. I reached out to ask for some release notes, but I haven't heard back. We went ahead and upgraded as Microsoft has a pretty good track record lately with these. Also the roll back seemed very straight forward. I'll let you know if I learn anything else

BES 10/Fusion API's

I really wish RIM would make it so you can tell the difference between doing something with the API's and the BAS console. Even if it was some log file entry somewhere. It is a pain in the ass looking back trying to figure out which one did something. This feature would be so easy to implement.

BES 10 hosted/on prem

It looks like RIM is putting more and more information everyday about BlackBerry 10/Playbook 2.1 etc: They even launched a new website BlackBerry 10 It looks like BES 10 is going to be in two forms, one is going to be on premises, the other is going to be in a hosted model, similar to how Microsoft handles Office 365.

I am curious to see how they are going to integrate with Office365. So far it seems that MS has been less then willing to work with MDM players. Here is the policy guide/admin guide from RIM Admin Guide

Mobile Fusion

So lately I've heard a lot of talk about BES 10. I did some research, and it looks like BES 10 is just mobile fusion with BES 5.4 built into it. They are going to rename mobile fusion to BES10 to remove the confusion. So in the future it is going to look something like this.