Endpoint Management

If you’re coming over from the Windows side of Intune, Android feels like a whole different beast on day one — because it is[cite: 1]. Windows management pretty much assumes one device, one main user, and one company owning the hardware[cite: 1]. Android, on the other hand, has to handle personal phones, shared devices, front-desk kiosks, and fully corporate-owned hardware all under the same MDM umbrella — sometimes even within the same tenant[cite: 1]. Before you start enrolling anything, you really need to map out your setup, or you’ll be spending the next few months untangling enrollment decisions[cite: 1]. ...

Everything covered so far in this series works the same way regardless of company size — the mechanics of enrollment, compliance, Conditional Access, app deployment, and baselines don’t change because the org is a non-profit. What changes is the constraints: a much thinner budget, often a very small IT team (sometimes exactly one person wearing every hat), and a board that reasonably wants to know why any dollar isn’t going toward the mission. This post is about running Intune well inside those constraints, drawn from real lean-IT-shop experience rather than enterprise assumptions. ...

Every part of this series so far has been about building capability into Intune — enrollment, compliance, access control, apps, baselines. This last one is about the flip side: everything that makes Intune powerful for administration makes it equally powerful for whoever manages to compromise the administrative layer. Whoever controls Intune can push scripts, alter configurations, and remotely wipe devices across an entire fleet in one coordinated action — and in March 2026, that stopped being a theoretical concern. ...

Here’s an uncomfortable fact about compliance policies that a lot of tenants learn the hard way: a compliance policy, on its own, doesn’t block anything. It evaluates a device against a set of rules and labels it Compliant or Not Compliant — that’s it. Nothing downstream actually happens unless something else is watching that label and acting on it. Get this wrong and you can have a fully built-out compliance policy that’s pure checkbox theater, catching real problems and doing absolutely nothing about them. ...

Kicking off a new series here on Intune — this one’s going to run long, because there’s a lot of ground worth covering: architecture and enrollment, compliance policy design, conditional access, app deployment, configuration baselines, real lessons from running it as a one-person shop, and the attack surface it introduces once it’s live. Part 1 starts with the boring-but-necessary step: being precise about what Intune actually is before deploying anything. ...

Part 1 covered what Intune is. This one covers the decisions that are expensive to unwind once devices are already enrolled and policies are already assigned — because unlike a compliance policy you can just edit, ownership model and tenant structure tend to get baked into a fleet from day one. ...