How to setup Surface Tablets for staff

[lafleur1977]

We have purchased 4 Surface Go tablets for shared use by our PE staff in changing rooms to take registers (School Synergy - website) so on the face of it quite straight forwards however they will also likely want to use them around school and probably at home, take photos, accessing shared drives, Office 365, etc.

 

Its the first time we have bought tablets and we've also bought Intune licences for management too (to allow us to lock/wipe the device if lost, view device status, maybe deploy apps, etc).

 

We normally add PC's/laptops to the domain which sets alot of policies for windows, allows users to sign in, network drives, printers, etc, but I'm thinking they need to be quick and easy for users to access and the domain is going to make them slower to pick up and use.

 

We have Chromebooks in school and users logon quickly via their school google domain account, regardless of whether they are in school or at home so I'm thinking the tablets need a similar approach and allow the user to sign in via office 365, manage by Intune perhaps.

 

We'd also normally image PC's/laptops via MDT with our custom windows image and I'm not sure if that's recommended for surface tablets or best to leave the OS as it comes.

 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

Edited November 3, 2022 by lafleur1977

[TechMonkey]

Recommended way is to get them on to InTune and AutoPilot them. You can add them in bulk via a CSV or by a script on each device. I wouldn't bother with MDT, get your InTune policies set up and go from there.

Once on AutoPilot you can run a Fresh Start, to clear all the preinstalled guff.

[lafleur1977]

Recommended way is to get them on to InTune and AutoPilot them. You can add them in bulk via a CSV or by a script on each device. I wouldn't bother with MDT, get your InTune policies set up and go from there.

Once on AutoPilot you can run a Fresh Start, to clear all the preinstalled guff.

 

Thanks for your reply. I've been looking at various MS articles for intune and there is a lot of info. So far we have enrolled 3 devices into intune via this method: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/join-your-work-device-to-your-work-or-school-network-ef4d6adb-5095-4e51-829e-5457430f3973

 

We noticed in endpoint manager admin that the device ownership was set to personal so changed this to cooperate. One of the 3 devices changed the login screen to allow us to sign in via 365 accounts but the others haven't.

 

I also set some policies in intune edu to one of our staff groups and these applied when signing in as a user on the one device which allows us to.

 

Am I on the right track? Is there any good guides you can recommend to help with the intune setup?

 

Thanks

[TechMonkey]

Sounds like a good start. https://katystech.blog/mem/intune-part-1-autopilot-win10 is a good guide to use.