One of the biggest issues with corporate system builds is getting consistency, especially for smaller organisations. It is often deemed unviable to automate system builds but it is far more cost effective than you may think. If you are a Microsoft house, using Windows 10 and Office 365 it makes sense from a security and automation perspective to subscribe to Microsoft 365 and realise the full benefits of all of the features. This allows the automation of a lot of functions and processes. In this post we will be focussing on Intune and Autopilot, the mechanism to automatically build corporate desktops / laptops, install software, configure security and encryption and even go so far as to change the look and feel of the layout and branding.
The benefit of this approach is consistency in the build and a significant reduction in downtime and support issues. A computer suffering from issues can be reset, rebuilt and refreshed in minutes fixing any issues it may have had by refreshing all of the OS settings, especially with hardware drivers that may have been causing issues. The user can initiate a remote reset if the issue is preventing them from connecting to the network and the rebuild, unless it is a hardware fault which is rare, configures the computer again so it can connect.
If the configuration is setup correctly, the user will have their machine rebuilt and all their applications and data restored, again in a matter of minutes (subject to their internet connection speed) which restores it back to the corporate image. The other nice feature is that if there is a hardware issue, a new laptop can be shipped to the user, they can power it on, walk through the initial Out of Box start up, get it connected to a network at which point it will identify it is an Autopilot machine and build itself using the configuration setup for the business.
If you would like more information or help with implementing Autopilot and Intune use the contact page to get in touch and we will be happy to have a chat.