The Microsoft Intune initiative had been dead in the water for nearly four years. The Help Desk Manager and Director wanted modern device management – the ability to automatically configure new computers, push out software updates, enforce security policies, and manage devices remotely without relying on on-premises infrastructure.
Intune and Autopilot were supposed to deliver all of that, but the project had stalled shortly after it was announced. The problem wasn’t capability – it rapid organizational change due to COVID-19, multiple changes in Directors, and competing directors with completely differing views on whose court that ball of responsibility landed in.
One director said Help Desk should to it, then Help Desk itself and its Lead Tech kept saying
“We don’t have the skills or ability please help.”
So the project just sat there, year after year, with nobody taking ownership.
In November 2024, I decided to bridge that divide by taking it upon myself to start doing the work. I didn’t ask for permission or wait for someone to assign it to me – I just started building.
- First, I initiated the company domain prep for Intune enrollment, working through the DNS and Azure configurations that should have been done years ago.
- Next in December, I created the Autopilot enrollment script and set up the Autopilot profiles that would allow new computers to automatically configure themselves when taken out of the box.
- In January 2025, I built out the policies and Intune apps that would enable automatic distribution of key software like our security suite, Microsoft Teams, Chrome, and other essential applications.
- By February 2025, we were ready to start actually enrolling devices. But we immediately hit roadblocks – 40 machines wouldn’t enroll properly due to an Entra Connect sync issue, security policies were breaking authentication in unexpected ways, and we discovered that our hybrid AD-Azure identity sync had been misconfigured for months. Each of these problems required deep technical troubleshooting that only the System Administrator team had the expertise to solve due to the ongoing server migration project I had to postpone my work with the Intune enrollment and I handed it over to my colleages.
- A few months later, my colleagues were stuck and could not make progress, even after contacting the “Intune expert” at our parent company. Even the official Microsoft support was stumped, we had the Level 2 Enterprise support technician stopping to ask the Tier 3 technical support for help.
I finally got involved again, when I realized how stuck the project was. After I got involved I had the problem resolved in a matter of hours. My team was so relieved that they finally had an answer.
My coworker Zach told me these exact words:
“Dude, you are our hero, like seriously we were not get anything done on those blockers. We would be on calls and their ‘expert’ just didn’t seem to know what to do, we made like zero progress. Then when you jumped on the call, you immediately took control and knew what to do or where to look to find the source of the problem. And then you went and solve it almost instantly. Dude, thank you!”
Over the next several months, I work with the team to systematically resolved each technical barrier:
- Fixed the Entra sync permissions
- Remediated the security compliance violations,
- Corrected the hybrid identity configurations, and
- Trained the Help Desk team on the enrollment processes so they could handle day-to-day device management.
At the end of August 2025 the four-year stalled initiative was finally complete.