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At Ignite 2019 there was some buzz in the area of device management with a new product called “Microsoft Endpoint Manager”. While the product name and management interface may be shiny and new, the underlying products are the same familiar products that device administrators have known for years. We’ll break down what’s included and explain some changes that may benefit (and possibly impact) current and future deployments.
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Microsoft Endpoint manager is comprised of the following products:
As much as I think the intention here is to help reduce customer confusion over products, features, and naming – Microsoft has still effectively added yet another name to the pile of already saturated acronyms, similar product names, and product packaging overlap. At the end of the day, every single product listed in this article still exists as its own entity, but now there’s an additional name for a group of them. I’m not sure how this exactly helps because as I see it, every customer falls more or less into one of the three following categories:
This customer is a Microsoft 365-only customer and probably doesn’t care as much how the products they are already entitled to receive are packaged or named.
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This customer may or may not welcome these changes, depending on where they are in their journey. A customer actively moving to Microsoft 365 will welcome consolidation, whereas another customer with only a portion of their infrastructure in the cloud may find it more difficult to keep track of the changes, especially where licensing is concerned.
These are the customers that really lose with the constant changes to names and packaging. If these customers aren’t able to clearly define where their software and solution boundaries are, they are more likely to have gaps, ultimately leading to issues with security and compliance.
To add to that last point, I’ll clarify that this problem isn’t Microsoft-specific. The entire security and device management industry has a lot of growing up to do when it comes to the realization that customers are building their own solutions, comprised of hand-picked vendors that best fit their needs.
Microsoft isn’t totally off the hook, though – they are completely responsible for the current spaghetti ball of licensing and customer comprehension for Microsoft 365 products and features if you don’t fit neatly into one of the E3/E5 buckets. But we’ll save that topic for another article.
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(Photo Credit: Microsoft via YouTube)
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