Microsoft Intune is pleased to announce partnership with Zebra Technologies, a leading manufacturer of ruggedized devices used by several industries such as retail, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and more. Microsoft Intune will support deeper management of Zebra ruggedized Android devices, starting with support for devices managed using Android device administrator mode, and adding support for Android Enterprise management later this year.

Many Intune customers already manage Zebra devices via Intune by leveraging Intune's Android settings management capabilities. The deeper integration will now allow these Intune customers to fully leverage the device management capabilities of their Zebra devices and Zebra specific settings. Others have been maintaining the overhead of another device management solution only for their Zebra devices. This integration will allow customers to enable Zebra ruggedized devices to be managed side by side with personal, corporate-owned, and bring-your-own (BYOD) devices they already managed using Intune. Customers simplify their device management workflows and reduce total cost of ownership by unifying endpoint management for all their devices.

Managing Zebra with Android device administrator mode

A number of our customers manage their Zebra devices as traditional Android devices in Intune. Customers can continue to leverage Android’s device administrator management capabilities while now being able to configure the Zebra specific properties via Intune. Intune will now enable the distribution of Zebra StageNow configuration profiles to Intune-enrolled Zebra devices. This enables customers to leverage their existing configuration tools to manage these devices via Intune.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Zebra MX profile creation in Intune admin console

To manage these devices, IT administrators will create an MDM enrollment profile with StageNow and use any of the supported staging options in StageNow (such as, barcode scanning, NFC or audio staging) to deploy the Intune Company Portal. After the device is enrolled with Intune, the device is ready to accept StageNow policy deployed by Intune. Customers can continue to deploy traditional MDM policies to Zebra devices as well. Availability will be communicated in the coming days on What’s New in Intune page.

Figure 2. Zebra devices that are being managed by Intune

Managing Zebra with Android Enterprise

Microsoft is working with Google to develop Intune support for the Android Enterprise platform, including the use of Android device policy controllers (DPC) for the device owner scenarios. We continue to collaborate with Zebra and Google to deliver Android Enterprise management for Zebra devices using the OEMConfig framework. This will allow organizations to continue to use Intune to manage their new devices as they move their hardware to Zebra devices running Android Enterprise. We expect this functionality to arrive later this year.

Next Steps

The partnership with Microsoft Intune allows organizations using Zebra devices to benefit from unified endpoint management without having to modify their current management workflows. The first phase of capabilities are already in development and estimated to release later this month.

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