Intune to Manage Windows PCs Online

A limited North American beta of a new cloud-based PC management service, Windows Intune, was introduced in Apr. 2010 and quickly filled up. Intune allows small to midsize organizations to monitor, update, protect, and manage PCs using online services hosted in Microsoft data centers, rather than using an on-premises management and security infrastructure. The subscription service also offers other benefits, such as upgrade rights to Windows 7 and access to other PC diagnostic and management tools. Intune is expected to be generally available in 2011, but no licensing or pricing information has been announced.

What Can I Do with Intune?

Intune is an online subscription service that provides antimalware, asset inventories, health monitoring, software updating, and group policy management. It is used by an organization’s administrators, not by Microsoft (which does not have access to information about the customer’s PCs). Intune is designed for small and midsize businesses without major on-premise system management tools, such as Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) or System Center, or security products, such as Forefront. (Intune is the new name for System Center Online Desktop Manager, which was announced in 2009 and has been in private beta since then.)