Microsoft - Why can't you provide better feedback for Autopilot Configuration & errors??

Posted by FWB4@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 6 comments

Title.
Getting ourselves ready to move to Windows 11 - and sorting out an absolute fucking mess left for me by previous technicians.
But the worst of it by a huge metric is Microsoft and their awful, awful provisioning service.

Did you know that you should not mix Win32 apps & LOB (.MSI) apps during autopilot pre-provisioning? I only found this out via a throwaway line on a Microsoft Knowledge article about Autopilot. I understand that not every mixture of LOB/W32 apps will cause autopilot errors but at a minimum a warning on the ESP config page would be nice (just a "Hey we notice you're doing this, but its not best practice so please take care).
Did you also know that Microsoft does not recommend using the built-in (CSP) method of deploying Office 365 to autopilot devices? I can't begin to explain what an absolute travesty it is that two of your own products can't interface properly - but also to Not provide any warning except 2 pages deep on an obscure knowledge article.
Why the fuck does autopilot not provide a detailed output of what specifically failed if it fails during pre-provisioning? your options are: Dig through the registry to find the GUID of the application that failed to install OR install a community script onto the machine to find the GUID of the application that failed 🙃. And thats just for applications - if you were deploying multiple certs to the machine I can't imagine its particularly easy to figure out which cert failed.

I constantly find myself shifting configurations away from intune, just to ensure they actually work. At the rate I'm going, I will have reverted our org back to WDS/MDT just to ensure that everything is installed & working before even seeing the OOBE.

Rant over. Fuck microsoft and fuck this shitty product.

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FallenLucifiel@reddit

John Malkovich said it best in the Space Force series 😂

Verukins@reddit

- Whenever you ask "why does Microsoft do X?" - The answer is always "because fuck you thats why". total, complete and utter comtempt for their customers.

- Large company, completely detached from reality and their user-base, no focus on anything other than making money - but no interest in making their products better to drive revenue - lets drive revenue by cutting costs, not testing our products and focusing purely on sales to the exclusion of everything else.

- As u/overdraft4706 accurately said - use SCCM (with co-management) and get the best of both worlds. Yes SCCM can be hard if you have not used it before - but unlinke Intune - there is fuck-tonnes of blogs/community support etc to get you over the line. Yes - there are plenty of blogs etc with Intune too - but no where near as much as SCCM.