(bright music)
- Coming up as part of our series on Windows Management,
we'll dive deep on the updates
for easily adding apps into Intune, powered by winget,
the new Windows Package Manager,
which is the foundation of our new store.
Now we'll show you the experience
for how admins can import and publish apps,
including EXEs and MSIs,
how this also applies to self-service app installs
from the Company Portal.
And if you're using the Microsoft Store for Business now,
we'll show you best practices to smooth your transition.
And joining us today to go deeper on the new experience
is Jason Githens from the Intune team.
Welcome back.
- Thanks. It's great to be back.
- And thanks for joining us today.
And this is actually management part four
for our Windows Management series.
So far we've covered cloud-based management,
including update management
and most recently new device provisioning
by enrolling them into Intune using Windows Autopilot,
Azure AD, and the Company Portal.
But today, we're actually focused
on app curation and provisioning,
because device enrollment does a great job
in terms of getting policies and apps on devices,
but the challenge is actually before that
getting apps into the Intune portal itself.
- You know, that's right.
And with this update,
we really want to make the experience a lot easier.
As an admin, you can easily find the latest versions
of the apps you need to make sure
that they are easy to install
in your Windows managed devices.
We're tapping into the Windows Package Manager, or winget,
and at the same time expanding the package types you can use
to add support for EXEs and MSI packages right from winget.
This is in addition to APPX and MSIX packages,
which you can also use.
If you're not familiar with winget,
it's a command line tool to find and configure apps.
I happen to be running this in Windows Terminal,
but it also works in PowerShell and the command prompt,
so it's fully automatable.
I'll run a help command,
and you'll see all of the different app operations
it can perform like installing,
searching, upgrading, and more.
I'll run a simple command to search
for Adobe using -s msstore to filter
on only the ones in the store.
And you can see it finds several packages,
a few of the XP prefix,
indicating that these are Win32 packages.
And to look at the details,
I'll run a show command using its ID
to view information for Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.
And here under installer
you'll see the app as an EXE file type.
So it's really easy to find app packages
and perform standard app operations against them.
- Right, and the good news here
is that this Windows Package Manager already has a lot
of great ISV support
and you're going to find a lot of useful apps in there.
So how does it work together with Intune?
- So to get to apps,
we've connected Windows Package Manager framework backend
to the Intune apps service and created a workflow
to make these experiences work seamlessly together.
Apps and their packages are maintained centrally
by the ISV publisher of the app package.
And as an Intune admin, you have complete control
to curate the experiences and what your users can install.
Let me show you the experience in the Intune admin center.
Starting from the All apps blade, I'll add an app.
For app type, we've added a new type
for the Microsoft Store,
and this is different compared
to the previous options for the store
because it enables you to find apps using built-in search,
which I'll show in a second.
Now I'll hit Select,
then I'll search for the app I want, Citrix.
In my case, I want to use the Citrix Workspace
with its new Windows 365 integration.
So I'll choose that.
You'll see the name, description, publisher, package ID,
and privacy URL are automatically pre-populated
so you don't need to cut and paste anything.
I'll select a category that will be used later
when this is made available in the Company Portal.
And then choose productivity.
I'll keep the rest of the defaults blank here to save time.
Next, here I can assign this app to users.
I can require it for some or all users and devices,
but in my case I'll make this available
to enroll devices for all users and confirm create.
Importantly, this app package remains where it is
and isn't getting imported into your Intune storage.
When this app is later installed on a device,
Intune is instructing that device to install directly
from its defined Microsoft Store location.
So it's not moving into your Intune storage allocation.
- And for Windows apps, this is probably the easiest way
to get those packages into the Intune portal
and I love to see
that we've got this package flexibility in place.
So does this then work with the Company Portal?
Say, for example, if a user wants to self-install some apps
that weren't set up as required on their device?
- Yeah, it works great with Company Portal.
In fact, I want to start with the admin experience
and along the way I'll highlight a few notable improvements.
From the Intune All apps view,
I can see my apps and many of them are only available
in the Company Portal intended for self-install.
So they aren't required.
All of these where the Type column indicates Microsoft Store
were added using the process I just showed.
I'll click into this app, Blender,
which is an open-source 3D creation suite.
Then I'll look at its properties
and you'll see that it has a logo image added.
And below that, again, it's not a required app.
Instead, it's set to available
for enrolled devices for all users.
So Jeremy, now that we've seen the available apps
from the store and have targeted your account
with a few available apps,
why don't you show us the end user experience
to self-install an application?
- Okay, sounds good.
So you can see here I've got the Company Portal open
and it looks like many of my apps are available to me
that we just saw from your Intune portal.
Notice that in addition to the line-of-business apps,
there are also third-party apps here with Blender
as we saw before and a few others from Adobe and Citrix.
Now what's different here again,
is that with the exception of these line-of-business apps,
all of these third-party apps are coming directly
from the ISV and approved for use by my organization.
- And as you saw,
to make this experience possible as an Intune admin,
I didn't need to download these apps
or repackage and up re-upload them
into my Intune environment
to provide this experience to you as an end user.
The global sourcing means
users can get the latest versions of the app too.
- And it's important.
It also means that they're going to have the latest security
and quality fixes applied to them.
But now let me go back into my Company Portal here
and if I go ahead and install the Blender app,
as you would expect,
the app starts the process
of using Intune's app installation service
on my device directly installing from Blender.
Now this is going to download the app in the background.
It's almost a 300-megabyte package,
so we'll speed things up just a little bit to save time.
Now if I go back into Windows 11, open my Start menu,
there's Blender marked as a recently added app.
So I'll go ahead and launch that.
And there it is.
It's installed, and it's ready to go.
- And of course this works
for standard user accounts as well,
even if the app requires admin-level permissions to install.
- And this experience is pretty similar to what you might do
when you authorize apps for mobile stores
all within the Intune admin center.
But in this case it's for Windows.
- Exactly.
And this new direction has several advantages,
especially in the area of app curation flow,
as we mentioned, there's already a ton of ISV support.
That said, as we announced in July 2021,
we'll be retiring the Microsoft Store for Business
and Store for Education next year.
So the integration work we built between Intune
and the Microsoft Store is designed to lay the path
to help you as you transition.
If you're using the Store for Business now,
this means that you'll be able to bring your apps
into the Intune admin center like I showed,
either as required apps assigned to users or devices
or available apps for self-install experiences.
And you'll use the Company Portal to enable that.
And as you saw in our example,
when I was enumerating using winget search
and also in Intune, when I added the new app
to my app portfolio,
each of these were coming from the Microsoft Store.
- That means for the most part,
the apps you're using with the Store for Business today
will be available via that process.
Plus, it is also expanding to Win32 based applications,
such as in the MSI and EXE packages.
And for your apps that are not in the store,
you can easily import your LOB app packages into Intune.
Of course, with the built-in user
and group assignment in Intune,
you can leverage role-based access controls
to scope exactly which user or device will get those apps.
And you can find even more guidance
for optimizing your transition from the Store for Business
to Intune at aka.ms/StoreTransition.
- And this winget integration along
with the Store really simplifies the process
for adding apps to Intune.
So do we need to configure anything
in order to get all of this integration
to light up within the Intune admin center?
- Well actually, we do the integration out of the box
and we're rolling this out now.
Once you see the new Microsoft Store app type appear
in your tenant,
you can follow the steps I demonstrated
to start adding your apps to Intune.
- Great stuff.
Thanks so much, Jason, for joining us today
and also sharing the new experience
for getting Windows apps into the Intune admin portal.
Of course, keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics
for all latest updates.
Subscribe to our channel if you haven't already.
And as always, thank you for watching.
(bright music)