Application installs best practice

Question

Hi There,
I recently joined a small company with 165 End users using Windows 10 Laptops scattered around the globe.

Thankfully this is a relatively new company and the end users are all on AAD and the devices are AAD joined, the end user licenses have just been upgraded to 365 Premium so that we can start to roll out Intune.

Prior there was only a handful with Premium Licenses and my predecessor has created an "Intune" AAD Group with only a few select people. The config and compliance policies are assigned to this group.

I have tested Autopilot and deployed applications for a few new machines and this works great, I have tested this with some Test AAD Groups.

Taking office 365 as an example where this application was historically installed manually on the devices. My question is, what is the best practice in deploying this as to not have this conflict with the machines with the manually installed application?

Do we add all users into the "Intune" AAD group and assign that group to the app or do we target all machines? I don't want to see lots of install failures because the app already exists on the target machines but I also don't want to have to maintain AAD groups for existing users and people onboarded after the rollout.

I maybe overthinking this but some guidance would be helpful as any web searches have just showed me how to setup intune but not how to integrate an already existing user and device base

Answer 1

@Adev67 , Thanks for posting in Q&A.

For the application, if the application is already installed, and we only want to install the application on the device which is without it. We can consider to deploy it via Win32 app. The detection rule in it can detect the presence of the app. We can see more details in the following link:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/apps/apps-win32-add

As a reminder, the install command and uninstall command in win32 configuration needs to support silent install without user interaction.

Meanwhile, In general, we will firstly deploy app to a test group to make sure it is working. Then try to deploy to others who want the app.

Hope it can help.

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