Intune

I’ve put this post together as an update for a number of schools who have asked me how we’re going on our Private Preview of MCC and will try to keep it generally updated on our progress. I’ll start with a bit of background though, for anyone new to this. You had me at DOINC The best product acronym Microsoft ever devised was DOINC, for the Delivery Optimisation In-Network Cache. This was a service that would store local copies of Windows and Office apps and updates so that client devices could access a fast, consistently-connected local copy rather than downloading from peers or over the Internet....

Microsoft made a decision to force what they consider to be insecure certificate bindings out of use, placing my great little workaround for modernising NPS onto life support. When their planned changes kick in, my own fleet of Azure AD-joined devices will be kicked out. Third-party products exist which solve this problem by operating independently of AD, however in a cash-strapped education context they aren’t financially viable against the negligible cost of running NPS....

In a masterful stroke of irony, within days of me sharing my solution for NPS RADIUS with AADJ devices, itself made necessary because Microsoft doesn’t consider the needs of their cloud-first customers, they made a major change to how certificates work in Active Directory in KB5014754 without considering the needs of their cloud-first customers. This change breaks the mechanism my solution relies on to operate and while there is a workaround, it is only viable until the change kicks in....

Microsoft’s Network Policy Server (NPS) has been running network authentication in the enterprise for decades but is now out of the loop when it comes to a modern cloud-first infrastructure. Using an inventive approach, I show that it is possible to overcome its recalcitrance and get it authenticating Azure AD-joined (AADJ) as well as on-prem AD clients. This is the long-form writeup of the project I presented at Microsoft’s Australia-wide Surface Gold & Lighthouse Virtual Event in May 2022....