As the world embraces the new reality of hybrid work, organizations have a responsibility to ensure a secure and optimized digital user experience across endpoints. Today, Microsoft announced the date for Windows 11 availability on the Windows Experience blog. As an integral part of the delivery and management of this new operating system built for hybrid work, we’re also announcing new Endpoint analytics capabilities, a cloud service of Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
Endpoint Manager, which brings together Microsoft Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune in a unified endpoint management solution, empowers organizations to secure apps and endpoints—all while optimizing digital experiences and resiliency for hybrid workforces.
Enhancements to Endpoint analytics help create a successful hybrid-work journey
The digital employee experience plays a huge role in overall satisfaction and productivity. Endpoint analytics is a cloud service that provides your organization with meaningful metrics and insights for measuring the quality of your users’ experience, while also helping you assess the performance and health of various endpoints managed by Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
With the mindset of continuous innovation, we’ve incorporated customer feedback and added key enhancements into Endpoint analytics to help with your journey toward supporting a resilient, productive hybrid workforce. As part of that effort, we recently released the Work from anywhere report into public preview. The work-from-anywhere score (between 0 and 100) is computed for all Intune and Configuration Manager devices that have opted into Endpoint analytics. Your organization’s score represents a weighted average based on the percentage of devices deploying insights for helping users be productive from wherever they’re working.
Understand device readiness for Windows 11 and other updates
One of the common challenges in managing endpoints is keeping them updated to ensure a secure user experience. With Windows 11 nearing release, you’ll need to know which of your devices are ready for an upgrade. The Windows metric helps you measure the number of devices running older versions of Windows. With the September 2021 release of Endpoint Manager, you’ll be able to see the readiness of all your managed devices for upgrading to Windows 11.
Based on how your devices are managed—Configuration Manager, Intune, or co-managed—you’ll receive remediation steps to upgrade your Windows OS version.
Figure 1: The work from anywhere dashboard
Provide new employees a seamless onboarding experience
As companies adjust to a more distributed workforce, onboarding new employees and delivering ready-to-use devices can be a challenge. Windows Autopilot helps you pre-install and preconfigure your devices with required applications and policies. From day zero, new employees receive pre-provisioned devices that require no additional assistance from the IT team. The Cloud provisioning metric helps you create a seamless onboarding journey for employees by providing insights around registering devices for Windows Autopilot and creating deployment profiles for existing devices using Intune.
Secure, consistent, and easy access to apps and critical resources
The next key factor in ensuring a great user experience is empowering your users to securely access critical resources from almost anywhere. With devices managed by Endpoint Manager and joined to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), you can enable single sign-on to apps and services. To ensure only authorized frontline workers have access to confidential data and apps, you can also use risk-based Conditional Access policies in Azure AD. That way you apply the right access controls where needed to help keep your organization secure.
The ‘Cloud identity’ metric in the Work from anywhere report informs you the number of devices that are joined to Azure Active Directory, and therefore the devices you are able to configure with the integrated services such as single sign-on to cloud and on-premises applications, multifactor authentication for security as well as conditional access policies.
Help your employees be productive through the power of cloud management
The fourth and most important metric in this report is cloud management. We’re seeing a huge adoption of Microsoft 365 among businesses turning to the cloud not just for digital transformation, but also to reduce their infrastructure costs and increase security. Cloud management provides you with the percentage of your devices that are connected to Microsoft 365 cloud; equipping you with the knowledge to use cloud-powered capabilities to improve endpoint performance, user experience, and productivity.
The detailed context pane on the dashboard shows you a breakdown of your devices in each management type: tenant-attached, co-managed, or Intune managed. By clicking on the compare management types tab, you’ll see the benefits your users receive by being part of each management type. You’ll find multiple recommended actions for co-managed devices and their workloads, cloud management gateway (CMG), and tenant-attached devices. We encourage you to check out how you can start using the Work from anywhere report today.
Proactively reduce helpdesk tickets with new app and device health insights
With the increase in hybrid work, IT helpdesk teams have had to extend their hours and resources to keep pace. To help address these shifts and reduce helpdesk workloads, we’ve further invested in Endpoint analytics to expand your visibility into the application and device landscape. By accessing app and device insights and recommendations relevant to your organization, your IT team is empowered to resolve issues even before they’re even reported.
Figure 2: Application reliability score dashboard
With Application reliability dashboard now generally available, it’s easy to identify desktop applications that affect user productivity in your organization. Assess the performance of the most critical and actively used applications with detailed insights into crash frequency and usage duration for each app. You’ll also get insights into how many applications are crashing on a particular device model, allowing IT to isolate devices from application issues while enabling faster troubleshooting.
Figure 3: Consolidated view of Application reliability
To help you gain a detailed understanding of your endpoints’ health, we’ve also introduced Device scores (in public preview). Save time and costs when resolving helpdesk tickets—drill down into how each device is performing in terms of startup performance, boot history, application health, and more. Easily sort devices that need immediate attention.
Continued innovation in Endpoint analytics
With millions of endpoints now managed by Microsoft Endpoint Manager, we’re focused on giving you a better understanding of the user experience—providing actionable insights and contextual recommendations, so you can continually improve in the right areas. We are also happy to announce the public preview of two Windows 365 Endpoint analytics reports that give administrators key performance metrics to improve their ability to monitor Cloud PCs.
Endpoint analytics has cloud-powered intelligence and is an integral part of the Microsoft Endpoint Manager. We’ll continue to drive innovations in Endpoint analytics to help you enable a resilient and productive workforce. We’re committed to helping you reduce the total cost of managing apps and devices by optimizing the employee experience, increasing IT productivity, and mitigating security risks with predictive automation, faster troubleshooting, and proactive remediations.
Learn More
- Endpoint analytics overview
- Manage devices in the cloud
- Work from anywhere report
- Start a free trial or buy a subscription
As always, we want to hear from you! For more information on getting started, visit the Endpoint analytics documentation and check out the FAQ. Tweet your questions or feedback using the hashtag #MEMpowered. If you have an idea for a new feature, add it to UserVoice.
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