Managing/Using/Deploying/Doing MS Surface Devices?

[Madman_Lorenzo]

Afternoon everyone.

 

Looking at obtaining more Chromebooks earlier on and surprised at how little I know on the alternatives in MS Surface devices. Had been having a Google around and, well, not even sure where I'd go to start (should I ever want to.)

 

Do you need Intune to enrol or manage them? Is it SEMM you need? What needs locking down for students in a broad sense and what can be left alone?

 

No need for a huge amount of detail but if anyone has a little overview or could direct me to some decent reading that'd be fab - most things I've found this afternoon are ads telling me how amazing Surface books are but no basic guides for what as a manager you'd need in place and what to do.

 

Thanks for any pointers.

[tapb]

There are a few places to start and much to say.

 

This might a good place to begin: Manage your education devices with Microsoft 365 - Learn | Microsoft Docs

 

If you're looking at Microsoft Surface Laptop SE devices that run Windows 11 SE mostly for Office and web apps, these videos might be a good start:

Microsoft Surface Laptop SE: IT Administrator experience - YouTube

Microsoft Surface Laptop SE | Student out-of-box experience - YouTube

 

You can use Intune with Autopilot to manage any Windows devices (not just Surfaces) and can also manage iPads/iPhones, Macs and Android devices.

[jamesrhart]

We deployed Surface Go’s 1:1 to our Y7 in September and we are now (literally on Monday) preparing 500+ devices to go out to our prep 5 to year 13 at the end of August. We have Go 3 from 5-9 and Pro 8 from 10-13, all with keyboard and pen, the pen we see as essential and one of the main reasons for going Surface. All our teachers run Pro’s with wireless displays in classrooms and no fixed PCs and so they are very comfortable with the devices.

 

We run the full MS stack, autopilot/Endpoint Manager, defender, full A5 licensing, universal print with papercut and are AAD joining devices, they have no on prem connection/requirement whatsoever, monitoring and safeguarding is classroom cloud and filtering is lightspeed relay. Core apps (e.g. Office) auto deploy, other apps (e.g. SolidWorks, 2D Design, Adobe) are published to the company portal allowing students to install on their own/when needed). Going by the Y7 devices they work really well for us, if anyone ever wants a chat about our setup I’m happy to have a Teams call.

[snagrat]

We deployed Surface Go’s 1:1 to our Y7 in September and we are now (literally on Monday) preparing 500+ devices to go out to our prep 5 to year 13 at the end of August. We have Go 3 from 5-9 and Pro 8 from 10-13, all with keyboard and pen, the pen we see as essential and one of the main reasons for going Surface. All our teachers run Pro’s with wireless displays in classrooms and no fixed PCs and so they are very comfortable with the devices.

 

We run the full MS stack, autopilot/Endpoint Manager, defender, full A5 licensing, universal print with papercut and are AAD joining devices, they have no on prem connection/requirement whatsoever, monitoring and safeguarding is classroom cloud and filtering is lightspeed relay. Core apps (e.g. Office) auto deploy, other apps (e.g. SolidWorks, 2D Design, Adobe) are published to the company portal allowing students to install on their own/when needed). Going by the Y7 devices they work really well for us, if anyone ever wants a chat about our setup I’m happy to have a Teams call.

 

We do the same from Reception to Y6 with the Surface Go. Different generation but this year will be 300+ i3 model to cover the outgoing lease.

 

I haven’t looked in a while but is the Company Portal still only available if you are the primary user of the device? We pre-enrol the pupil devices so was an issue for us to use it. Staff were ok as we would distribute ready for them to enrol

[jamesrhart]

Short answer is that I don’t know as ours are all set as the student as the primary user and we don’t expect anyone else to use their device. We’ve gone with i3 Go 3’s as well and then Pro 8 i5 Evo/256GB. The Go 2’s we already have are not i3’s and whilst they work fine we wanted a little more ‘grunt’.

[snagrat]

Yeah same. The Go2 (and 1s going back this year) we’re the Pentium models.

 

You must get the student to enrol themselves then to set the primary user?

[jamesrhart]

That’s our normal procedure. We are bulk password resetting this year to ensure they are all ready for day 1 when every device goes out. Anyone new we know their initial password and will log in for them.

 

We assign primary user in autopilot before hand as well as naming the device LT-%USERNAME%. Technically with autopilot we have no need to log them in, but we are just trying to speed up the first login and also for this year our wifi replacement has been delayed due to stock issues (ordered in March!) and so it will be less stress on the wifi as they all get their devices at the same time.