Groups writeback enables customers to leverage cloud groups for their hybrid needs. If you use the Microsoft 365 Groups feature, then you can have these groups represented in your on-premises Active Directory. This option is only available if you have Exchange present in your on-premises Active Directory.
It takes your M365 Cloud groups and recreates them on-premises, in a configurable target OU.
Enabling or disabling this feature is fairly easy, and is wonderfully explained here. However, when migrating towards another server or version of AAD Connect, finding out in what OU the groups are / have to be stored is not that transparent.
Fortunately, there isa way! Using the below PowerShell line, the OU is displayed:
SCAPPMAN is a “Software as a Service” platform that allows organizations of any size to simplify and manage application and patch management for Microsoft Intune.
It is a Belgian-based start-up that made the choice of opting for a full cloud management experience (the customer does not have to install or maintain any components themselves), and aims to be known for its expertise, innovation and flexibility.
Because especially patch management can be a burden within the built-in components of Microsoft Intune, many organizations can surely benefit from this solution!
In the first section of this series, I will focus on licensing and onboarding.
Licensing
A 30-day trial (which is automatically started at onboarding through this link is the first step into “scappman-world”. It allows you to fiddle with a fully functional environment and start deploying & updating apps.
After the initial 30 days, you are offered to convert the trial towards a full “subscription”. The step gathers all assigned Microsoft Intune SKU’s and provisions a scappman license for it.
This is a double-edged sword; you can have 200 Intune licenses available in your tenant, but only 20 assigned. Only the 20 users will be licensed for scappman. However, all 20 users will be taken into account, and there is no way to only license scappman for a limited scope of users within your tenant. (Which actually makes sense, you don’t want to secure only a subset of users of your organization, right?)
Pricing is quite transparent and based on the following graduated scales:
# of users
price per user per month
1-50
€ 2
51-250
€ 1
251-5000
€ 0,3
All prices are ex. VAT and based on a monthly subscription.
Onboarding
This will be by far the shortest topic that I will cover throughout this entire series. Because – and I am not approaching this from any commercial angle- onboarding really is a breeze.
You browse to https://portal.scappman.com, click register and sign in with Global Admin credentials. Then, a confirmation screen appears which will create an app registration with the following permissions:
This allows SCAPPMAN to integrate with your existing Azure AD and Endpoint Manager environment, and to act as an additional layer for application management and patching.
After signing in, the portal opens, which is your “access” to all of SCAPPMAN features, opens:
What’s next?
In this “episode”, I discussed both licensing and onboarding. In the following days and weeks, I will be focussing on actual configuration and daily usage of SCAPPMAN. Stay tuned!