Azure? InTune? AutoPilot? Entra? What's All this?

For many years, and still today, Lehigh has used a Microsoft Active Directory system as part of its set of tools for “authentication”. Authentication is the process by which a computer system verifies that someone using it is who they say they are. Most prominently, this is done by storing a password for each user and also classifying each user within groups (which college, which stem, etc.). Since purchasing and maintaining server hardware is expensive in both time and money, LTS has been working to move many operations, including authentication, to the cloud (other people’s servers). LTS operates both a local Active Directory server (on-premise) and a cloud-based “Entra ID” service which is used to authenticate users logging into InTune-managed computers.

The fastest way to describe this is probably with a quick glossary of terms:

Azure – Microsoft’s cloud computing environment, where virtual servers are made available over the web

AzureAD – the name for Microsoft’s cloud-based identity management system prior to ‘Entra ID’

Entra ID – Microsoft’s cloud-based identity management system (uses Azure servers)

InTune – Microsoft’s cloud-based computer management system. Lehigh’s Entra ID users can log into Lehigh’s InTune computers.

AutoPilot – Dell’s name for the service of integrating purchased computers with InTune for automatic deployment.

Device Enrollment Program – generic term for any vendor’s service for registering a particular computer with it’s manufacturer’s automated deployment program.

What it means for Lehigh users (faculty and staff) is this: you can order a computer system and have it shipped direct to you, anywhere in the world, and, without ever having been at Lehigh or touched by LTS, if you ordered via our purchasing partner, and the order included the device enrollment service, that system, on booting up, and connecting to the internet, would know that it was a Lehigh system, would be able to log you in with your Lehigh credentials, and automatically make all of the needed customizations to be a Lehigh computer system, including downloading office software, anti-malware software, etc., all automatically.

It also means that you log in with your email address rather than just your username. That enables the Microsoft InTune servers to know to look for your account among Lehigh’s. As a help, these systems set the machine names of InTune-managed computers to start with “AP” (for autopilot) rather than “FS” as had been the format prior.

Further, LTS staff can look up both users and computers in the InTune cloud system, and find out who belongs to what, and where they are, and if they’re missing any software or settings that are appropriate.

https://intune.microsoft.com