New Group Policy Analytics Tool Lets IT Admins Assess MDM Migrations

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Key takeaways:

  • Microsoft has announced the general availability of its new Group Policy analytics tool.
  • The tool can help IT admins understand their current GPO environment and detect any potential conflicts or issues. This information can be used to make informed decisions about how to migrate to Intune.
  • The total size of the imported XML file must be less than 4 MB.

Microsoft has released a new Group Policy analytics tool that lets organizations import, analyze, and migrate on-premises GPOs to Microsoft Intune. The new offering provides a detailed report for each GPO and includes a migration wizard that helps IT admins move supported settings to mobile device management (MDM) tools.

Specifically, the Group Policy analytics tool provides a detailed report for each GPO with information about the settings, usage, conflicts, as well as Intune equivalent policy. “Group Policy analytics helps you import your GPOs, analyze the settings through sharable reports, and migrate settings from your GPO to Intune. From here, the settings can be managed just like a standard Intune device configuration policy,” Microsoft explained.

The Group Policy analytics tool shows various settings supported by Microsoft Intune and other cloud-based MDM providers. It also allows administrators to remove Windows client dependencies on on-premises Active Directory and move to Microsoft Intune management instead.

Group Policy migration readiness report

With the Group Policy analytics tool, IT admins can view a migration readiness report with details about Group Policy Objects (GPOs) that could have conflicts with Intune policies. The report also makes it easier to track missing policies that are similar to the GPO. It’s also possible to view GPOs that are ready for migration or deprecated.

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Group Policy analytics tool offers Migration Support

The Group Policy analytics tool provides a migration wizard that can help IT admins move the supported settings to MDM tools. It gives IT admins the ability to migrate settings from a single or multiple GPOs to a Settings catalog policy.

“Any settings that successfully migrate will be included in the new Settings catalog profile. For those that don’t migrate successfully (possibly due to a missing parent/child setting or an unexpected format), the process will report an error in the Notifications field on the Group Policy analytics page,” Microsoft added.

To get started with Group Policy analytics, IT admins will need to perform a couple of steps to export their GPO as an XML file. Then, administrators can view the details with the Group Policy Analytics feature in the Microsoft Intune Admin Center portal. However, keep in mind that the total size per import should be less than 4 MB in order to import multiple GPOs at one time.