The World According to Mitch

**NOTE: I do not know if there is currently an official logo for Microsoft Intune. Of the two included in this article, one was the original logo in 2010, and the other was found on the Internet.

After being introduced to Microsoft Intune in the early part of the last decade, I was troubled by a lot of the changes that Microsoft brought to it over a multi-year period leading up to early 2021. They had done away with the Silverlight platform and integrated it into Microsoft Azure, which I suppose was not the worst thing in the world. They changed the interface completely a number of times, and they forced managed computers to be AzureAD joined. A lot of my reticence about the changes to the platform revolved around my comfort level with the original system, and my resistance to change. Don’t worry, I got over all of those, and once again became pretty familiar with the platform. As a FastTrack Engineer with Microsoft in 2021, I spent a lot of time teaching others of the benefits to it.

The one thing that I had the most trouble with was the fact that they renamed it… kinda. In August 2020 I spent two weeks at a company, and one of my co-workers did not like me on spec. Every time I started to talk about Microsoft Intune he rudely pointed out that it was now called Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Okay, fair enough… but do you have to be so rude about it? I only stopped calling System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) something like ten years after Microsoft renamed it. He had formed his opinion of me, and I was not going to spend a lot of time there because of that.

Microsoft does rename things from time to time, often products or features that had been common for years. Sometimes they have good reason for it, oftentimes they do not. For example, I understand perfectly why they renamed Terminal Services to Remote Desktop Services. We could use it to connect to a terminal server… or to any Windows client running a professional or enterprise SKU that had remote access enabled. It truly was a remote desktop service. Active Directory (AD) was renamed Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) at some point, mostly I suspect because they planned to launch Azure Active Directory, and they wanted to avoid confusion.

As we can see from these two examples, one change was based on the evolution of the technology, the other was more marketing than technical. So when Microsoft decided to rename Intune to Microsoft Endpoint Manager, they did so mostly to align it more closely with the (also recently renamed) Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager. The two solutions were one solution family, so their names should reflect that. I cannot begin to count how many times I have uttered the phrase: ‘Microsoft Endpoint Manager I mean Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager.’ I am not alone – many of my colleagues on the FastTrack team at Microsoft would say the same. We also continued to use the name Intune… but then again, most of us were still calling its partner solution System Center Configuration Manager. The renaming of Intune was entirely a marketing decision… and it never really caught on.

Yesterday someone told me that Microsoft had changed their minds on this decision, and that the solution was, once again, Microsoft Intune. Logging onto my portal this morning, I was happy to see the change was made.

In the grand scheme of things, Shakespeare was right: What is in a name? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. On the other hand, when you are used to calling something by one name, it is hard to make that change. The change from Intune to Microsoft Endpoint Manager was never widely accepted, and the only people who really called it by the new name were people who had never really known it as Intune. I am just happy that I will no longer have to try to remember this change, and can go back to calling it what it really should have been.

I hate to use the play on words, but it is nice to know that in this case Microsoft is finally in tune with its customers.