Today Microsoft continued their relentless push towards a “Cloud First Mobile First” strategy with some significant updates to both Intune and Office 365.  In an MSDN blog post from Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Enterprise Client & Mobility (which can be found here) Microsoft announced that as of Q1 2015 any Office 365 subscription will include an enhanced feature set for Mobile Device Management (MDM).  On the heels of yesterday’s announcement that all O365 subscriptions will now come with unlimited OneDrive storage there can be little doubt that Microsoft is all in on the cloud.

Within our own practice we have beta tested several MDM options and each seems to have their own set of shortcomings.  Often the first among these is the inability for the MDM service to differentiate between private and corporate data.

With this release, Microsoft is stating that the Office 365 administrator will have granular control over corporate vs private data and will have the option to selectively wipe business data in the event of a device loss, or employment status change.

Wider Deployment of the full Intune Platform

While the MDM enhancements are a welcome upgrade to the existing Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) solution, we should remember that in some ways Microsoft is using this as a teaser to encourage a wider deployment of the full Intune platform.

They are being very upfront that the included features (see below for the highpoints) are simply a subset of the full Intune package and do not include some of the “heavy lifting” features of the full suite.

Four Feature Highlights

Based on this early deliverable, however, even this subset of features will be a huge benefit to any IT admin who has already made the jump to the Office 365 platform.

As an early adopter of Office 365 and a member of the early release program we will be keenly awaiting this release and will share our feedback following our own internal rollout.