Seems like Microsoft really cares a lot about the ideas that users post on the Intune Feedback page. 🙂 Again, like in my other post about Intune MAM for On-Prem Exchange, they finally implemented a feature in Microsoft Intune which was long and eagerly waited for. I’m just giving you a brief summary here.

In my opinion this new feature is a great breakthrough and a huge step forward for the Windows client management with Microsoft Intune. I still remember how we struggled to get some Windows applications on Windows clients through Microsoft Intune during our Intune evaluation project. We were just not able to deploy or manage a lot of our Windows applications with Intune.

The What

Soon, we will be able to deploy almost any Windows application to Intune MDM managed Windows clients and manage them with Intune. This, including formats like MSI, EXE, or MSP/MST. Microsoft is also providing us a special packaging tool for this: The “Intune Win32 App Packaging Tool” which you can download from GitHub.

You can define client requirements for the applications, as well as so called detection rules and much more. This will make the package check before it is installing if the client meets the specified requirements, or if the app is already installed on the client. All these settings can be configured through the “Intune Win32 App Packaging Tool”.

The How

With this packaging tool you will first configure and then package your app. You need to point the tool to the folder in which all necessary files for your app are located in. Afterwards you just upload the package to your Intune portal. From here on you can deploy the app like any other Intune app as described here.

The When

Since the feature is still only a public preview, it might not be available for our tenants, yet. In this case we just need to be patient 🙂 Hopefully, Microsoft will release the new feature, soon.

Please find detailed information about all of this in the following sneek peek from Jain Mayunk, a product manager at Microsoft.