Autopilot User Driven versus Shared Device - Why the seperation?

Question

Hi y'all,

Our consultant setup our Intune & Autopilot environment with a clear distinction between shared devices and user driven.

But why is this seperation between the 2 modes?

For us this is hard to grasp: Now we have 2 different types of preparation with Autopilot: One rollout mechanism for Shared Devices and one rollout mechanism for user driven devices.

So please could someone explain us why there is a clear distinction between shared devices and user driven devices?

Are there any technical limitations or advantages to one or the other?

Could we not just handover Windows 10 shared device to a single user, without the need to share this device with others?

About 80 percent of our users are working from a shared device in shifts, about 20 percent of our users are laptop users who own a company device for their own use.
We have a mix of M365 F3, E3 and E5 users.

Our shared devices are now using Office 365 and OneDrive solely from the Web, we would like to change this to full apps in the future.
Our user driven devices are using the full apps of Office 365 and OneDrive.

Answer 1

Autopilot self deploying is suited to kiosk and shared devices. There is no user associated with the device. User driven is suited to 1:1 scenario and you can associate a user to a device. Most of this is covered here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/autopilot/windows-autopilot-scenarios

Answer 2

@Leo Johnson Thanks for posting in our Q&A.
When a device is enrolled during a User-Driven Autopilot Deployment, the Primary User will become the user that joins the device to Azure AD.

When a device is enrolled during a Self-Deploying Autopilot Deployment, there is no Primary User for the device and it is tagged as a "Shared" device.

Note that the Company Portal behaves differently for User-Driven vs Self-Deploying devices. In a User-Driven deployment, only the Primary User may install available applications from the Company Portal on the device. In a Self-Deploying deployment, any user may install available applications assigned to them using the Company Portal.

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Answer 3

Hello @Leo Johnson

All the details are publish in the next official articles. There are many differences, so better linking the whole information:

Shared Devices: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/autopilot/self-deploying
User Driver: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/autopilot/user-driven

Hope this helps with your query,

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Answer 4

I think, for shared devices he used Self-Service provision which does not require user account nor user based license. The distiction is done, because you can have only User Driven Autopilot or only Self-Service. If you have multiple Autopilot profiles, you would need to use group tags (think them as variables) for device hashes to flow under correct Autopilot profile.