As Microsoft Configuration Manager versions reach end of life in 2024 and 2025,1 enterprise IT leaders are quickly migrating applications to Microsoft Intune. There are challenges with creating plans for application migration and always questions.
As a Microsoft Partner, Rimo3 technical teams speak with both enterprise customers who are planning Intune migrations and those who have paused a project due to application migration issues.
Learn how to plan a more successful Intune migration by understanding some of the top challenges we hear from enterprise customers.
Explore more in this short demo video on how to migrate applications from SCCM to Intune.
1. How Do I Understand What I Have in Microsoft Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
The first step is understanding what applications are in SCCM and need to migrate to Intune.
It’s common for enterprises to build up a large amount of technical debt. Over time, the ownership of SCCM may have changed and there may be gaps in knowledge.
For example, you might have older versions of applications you’re no longer using, or applications that don’t contain any shortcuts, such as driver packages, or complex scripts that reference locations or repositories that no longer exist.
How can you understand what you have today and what should migrate to Microsoft Intune?
How to Automate Application Discovery for an Intune Migration
Enterprises are using the Rimo3 platform to easily import the metadata from the artifacts that are in SCCM today. Without automated application discovery, an enterprise must go through the arduous manual process of inspecting each application. This entails reviewing the file contents of the application or installing the application to understand what it is being installed and what dependent applications and services are required.
From here, the Rimo3 platform automates the discovery of those applications, enabling you to understand which ones are truly applications that deliver shortcuts to your end users.
The automated discovery process installs the application on a virtual machine loaded with your current Windows build. Then, it identifies any missing dependencies or any other errors that can occur during installation.
Saving time and effort, the Rimo3 Cloud automated discovery process enables data driven decisions for application rationalization. With this detail, it’s now easier to decide what applications you migrate to Intune as part of your journey to achieve cloud native.
Rimo3 enables you to import all your SCCM applications and initiate the Rimo3 automated discovery process. This saves time and effort that is typically used to manually audit your applications. Rimo3 Cloud also empowers you to determine the level of automation. For example, you want to rationalize your applications, therefore automate the import and discovery stages, then pause to rationalize.
2. How Do I Validate Applications Before Migrating from SCCM to Intune?
A challenge you may be facing is that you are currently managing Windows 10 endpoints, and these are likely in a co-managed state. You are planning a migration to Windows 11 to move to cloud native with Intune. Perhaps you have many applications that are currently being delivered by SCCM.
Before you migrate your applications to Intune, you should investigate which applications will still run and perform in the same way they currently do on Windows 10.
For a detailed understanding of Rimo3 application validation, explore the Validate360 product webpage, which includes a short demo.
Use Automated Smoke Testing to Validate Applications for Windows 11
As part of the Intune migration, it’s important to understand if the applications will perform as expected on the enterprise’s specific Windows 11 configuration.
It can take over two hours of manual effort to test a simple application and increase to over four hours for a complex application. To save time and considerable work, you can use the Rimo3 platform to leverage a patented automated smoke test technology to validate your applications against your Windows 11 configuration. By doing this, you can reduce test time for a simple application to 12 minutes and 30 minutes for a complex application.
The Rimo3 platform provides data to help understand which applications run successfully in your target environment and which require remediation. This enables you to focus only on where effort is required, rather than focusing all effort on manually creating test environments, installing each application, launching each application, and remediating applications that fail to launch. The manual approach also makes it extremely challenging to quantitively compare application performance against a previous version of Windows.
While facilitating and accelerating this smoke testing, you will gather rich evidence through reporting, which includes screenshots and video recording of applications launching successfully and those that fail.
Having this detailed evidence will accelerate the remediation for applications that fail by removing the time it takes to pinpoint the exact moment an application fails and the error message that gets produced. This evidence is also important for audit trail and compliance purposes. It ensures you have a complete record of application validations in your production Windows environment.
With a clear, yet detailed report, the Rimo3 platform also shows you if applications are performing the same, worse, or better compared to the performance baseline that was taken when Rimo3 onboarded and ran the application against your current Windows build.
Before migrating applications from SCCM to Intune, Rimo3 Cloud automates the application validation process to ensure that you can move to Intune with the confidence that your end users will not be impacted by unexpected application failures.
For business-critical applications where UAT can’t be avoided, the Rimo3 platform empowers you to automate the provisioning of a UAT VM with your installed and test-ready application. You can record the session within Rimo3, and view results in the platform alongside the automated test results.
You can see which of your applications passed or failed the Rimo3 patented intelligent smoke test. If their performance has changed since your previous version of Windows, and if the application passed or failed UAT. Rimo3 provides you with a comprehensive view of your application estate’s readiness for your next version of Windows.
3. How Do I Quickly Move Applications to Intune When I Have Limited Resources?
In some cases, your organization may want to decommission Configuration Manager and move natively to Intune in very tight timescales.
If your Windows estate is already co-managed, you may still have all applications in Configuration Manager and need to migrate them to Intune. In this case, resources are stretched with BAU activity, which acts as a constraint for migration quickly.
How Rimo3 Helps Move Applications with Limited Resources
Rimo3 Cloud leverages automation and Azure Compute so you can perform application migrations to Intune at scale, even when you are constrained by limited time and staff.
Rimo3 Cloud can migrate a simple application in under a minute and multiple applications in parallel.
This automated process starts by wrapping your application as an Intune Win32 application, creating application object in Intune using the metadata Rimo3 discovered from your application in SCCM. Finally, the Rimo3 platform automates the upload of the intunewin file to your Intune tenant. Now you have an application in Intune that is ready for assignment.
Rimo3 enables you to meet an aggressive SCCM application migration to Intune timescale with time to spare. This is achieved through Azure Compute combined with Rimo3 platform automations that allow the compute to scale to meet your timescales and needs. The alternative is human IT staff spending between 30 minutes to an hour per application to manually add it to Intune. With the Rimo3 automation, you can migrate applications in as little as two minutes and perform multiple migrations in parallel.
You can migrate single applications to Intune or perform bulk migrations, the choice is yours, plus Rimo3 enables you to automate the entire process and have your migration completed within your timescales.
Discover, Validate, and Migrate Applications from SCCM to Intune
Migrating applications from SCCM to Intune can seem daunting, but understanding what you have, validating applications, and moving applications quickly can streamline the process.
By leveraging the Rimo3 platform, you can automate the discovery, validation, and migration of your applications, making the transition smoother and more efficient.
Embrace the power of automation to simplify your migration journey and unlock the full potential of Microsoft Intune for your enterprise.
1 - Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager end of life Microsoft Configuration Manager - Microsoft Lifecycle | Microsoft Learn
