Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining – part 5 Enabling compliance policies workload

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Introduction

This is part 5 in a series of guides about cloud attach in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, with the aim of getting you up and running with all things cloud attach. This part will focus on enabling the compliance policies workload. This series is co-written by Niall & Paul, both of whom are Enterprise Mobility MVP’s with broad experience in the area of modern management. Paul is 4 times Enterprise Mobility MVP based in the UK and Niall is 10 times Enterprise Mobility MVP based in Sweden.

In part 1 we configured Azure AD connect to sync accounts from the on premise infrastructure to the cloud. In part 2, we prepared Azure resources for the Cloud Management Gateway, in part 3 we created the cloud management gateway and verified that everything was running smoothly. In part 4 we enabled co-management. With co-management, you retain your  existing processes for using Configuration Manager to manage PCs in your organization and you gain the additional advantage of being able to transfer workloads to the cloud via Endpoint Manager (Intune). In this part we'll enable the compliance policies workload and see how that affects a co-managed computer.

Below you can find all parts in this series.

 

• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 1 Configuring Azure AD connect
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 2 Prepare for a Cloud Management Gateway
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 3 Creating a Cloud Management Gateway
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 4 Enabling co-management
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 5 Enabling compliance policies workload <- you are here
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 6 Enabling conditional access
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 7 Co-managing Azure AD devices
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 8 Enabling tenant attach
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 9 Renewing expiring certificates
• Cloud attach - Endpoint Managers silver lining - part 10 Using apps with tenant attach

 

Step 1. Verify compliance status in Endpoint Manager

Before making any changes to workloads, on a co-managed device, open devices in Microsoft Endpoint Manager and locate that device, you should see that the compliance state is in a status of See ConfigMgr.

Step 2. Create an Azure AD group

In Endpoint Manager, create a new Azure Ad group which you'll use in the next step. Give it a suitable name like Co-managed compliance policies devices, this group should have a membership of Assigned.

 

Step 3. Add some devices to the workload collection

Next, add one or more devices to the collection that you will use when piloting a compliance workload. You can add the device(s) by selecting them and right clicking, choose Add selected items to Existing Device Collection and then point them to the relevant collection corresponding to that workload. The collection you will add device(s) to in this case is the Co-managed compliance policies collection.

 

Step 4. Enable Azure Active Directory group sync

In this step you'll enable synchronization of a collections membership to an Azure Active Directory group. This allows you to easily sync the membership of a collection in your on-premises environment to Endpoint Manager. In this step you'll sync one collection but you could add multiple collections depending on your needs. The sync takes place every 5 minutes.

To enable this, expand Cloud Services in the Administration node of ConfigMgr, select Azure Services, select Cloud Management service properties and on the Collection Synchronization tab, place a check in Enable Azure Active Directory Group Sync.

Next, right click the collection you want to sync and choose Properties. In this example you'll right click on the previously created Co-managed compliance policies collection as shown below.

In the properties of that collection, select the Cloud Sync tab.

Next, click on Add, then enter a search term such as co-managed to add the Azure AD groups you will sync to from Configuration Manager.

Click on OK when done. After 5 minutes, you can browse the Azure AD group created in step 2 and you should see the co-managed devices have synced.

Step 5. Create a Compliance policy

In Microsoft Endpoint Manager, select Devices in the left pane, select Windows, select Compliance Policies and click on + Create Policy, in the Create a policy window, select Windows 10 and later for the Platform. Then click on Create.

select Windows 10 Compliance Policy, enter a name for it and click Next.

select Require for the Require Encryption of data storage on device section and then click Next.

Set Actions for noncompliance to mark the device as non compliant immediately. You can set a grace period for non-compliance however we want to force this the device to be non compliant quickly for this blog post.

Next, assign the compliance policy to the previously created Azure ad group, then don't forget to click on Review+Save.

Step 6. Check the client

Logon to the client computer that you added to the compliance policy workload collection, and open the ConfigMgr agent. Once the Configmgr client agent receives the policy it will flip the co-management capabilities value from 1 to 3 as shown here. You can get details about what those capability values can be in Ben's blog post here.

And this switch is revealed in the CoManagementHandler.log

and the registry key it's referring to is this one.

Next, we decrypted the device to ensure that it didn't match the compliance policy.

If you now check in Endpoint Manager, under devices, the device will show up as Not Compliant.

You can drill deeper in the Device Compliance node of the device itself.

and click on the Error

Next, we allowed BitLocker to Encrypt the device

After the device has checked-in with MEM and reported it's compliance state, the change will be updated in Endpoint Manager as Compliant.

finally, you can look at the individual compliance settings on the device itself.

that's it for this part, see you in Part 6 where we'll enable Conditional Access.