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Having a great Pilot Program.
I work in the Financial / Medical industry and piloting all changes before production release is crucial to success. It is also important to know who the users are so that they can be communicated with when big changes are being tested on them so that we can get feedback. We use this group for all testing in our environment, they are used to the process and know what to expect.
WUfB tries to do something like this with AutoPatch, however that solution is not intelligent on the backend, randomly selecting devices without any analytics being done.
In the past we had to cold call managers to get participation in our Pilot Program to ensure we had 5-10% of users accounted for. The problem was we did not have a great way of cataloging / normalizing application names and making sure we had everything covered.
Desktop Analytics introduced a function called "Identify Pilot" which we utilized with great success. This seemed to analyze our application catalog based on information from ConfigMgr and then help us identify a pilot that covered the most applications with the fewest devices/users. We were also able to select a group of our current pilot devices that was taken into consideration.
We were then able to inform managers that these users were part of the pilot program and why. It was based on telemetry and analytics; it wasn't anything personal or guess work.
Well, people switch groups, roles, leave, and we need a way to re-evaluate our Pilot Program coverage.
Right now it appears our only option is to export the "Discovered Apps" under Apps monitoring in Intune. Then open the 1+ million row csv and manually normalize apps, and work some Excel magic to try and figure out what machines/users to add.
It would be great if this type of feature was reintroduced. I would imagine that many other companies could utilize something like this.
Or is there another solution out there in the wild that can do this? I guess even if there was a way to get a report of normalized products/publishers in Intune, that would help a great deal.