I get asked regularly by schools about which version of Intune they should be using when managing devices in their school: Intune for Education or the full version of Intune standalone. It’s a worthwhile question given the products sound so similar and towards the end of 2017 Ari Schorr wrote a good blog post answering this question:
Read Ari’s full blog post here.
He references a whitepaper that is good for education partners to read called “The state of modern device deployment in education” but when it comes down to which version of Intune to use I generally ask the following questions:
- Are you only going to be managing Windows10 Devices?
- Yes? Use Intune for Education
- No? Use full Intune for multi-OS management
- Will teachers and other less technical people be wanting to manage settings and push applications?
- Yes? Use Intune for Education if possible (see above re: Win10) as the interface is simplified and very easy for non-technical people to use.
- No? Use either, if you’re more comfortable with a large amount of settings and configuration options then the full version of Intune will be more valuable.
- Do you have advanced configuration settings and policies you want to configure on the devices you’re managing (i.e. replicating Group Policy).
- Yes? Use the full version of Intune standalone as this has significantly more settings and options
- No? Use Intune for Education if dealing only with Windows 10.
Remember, the important thing to get this working is to use AzureAD as your underlying identity management. You can get a lot of assistance from the Microsoft Education Documentation and Resources link. Specifically:
- Intune for Education
- Azure Active Directory
- Set Up School PCs App (SUSPC) (free tool to load a provisioning package onto new devices to automatically connect them to the school wifi, join to AzureAD and enroll the device into Intune)
- School Data Sync (free tool to assist with populating Office365 with student/teacher/class information)
I hope this helps with your decision making process around which version of Intune to use in your school but if you have further questions drop them in the comments section below and I’m happy to answer them.
