Perhaps you have been in this scenario before. An employee leaves your organisation and you’ve had to call your local IT provider to wipe and re-provision the device for a new user. Or maybe you have just created a new profile on the system for a new employee, leaving all of the old data and meta data on the system, taking up space and potentially leaving unneeded software running in the background.

Microsoft has been building a solution by taking a page out of the mobile world. This process is simply to wipe the device with a few clicks thanks to Mobile Device Management and bang, the device is ready to go for that new user!

This feature is called Windows Autopilot and it is one of those hidden features that IT pro’s just aren’t doing mainly because it falls into the Mobile Device Management world. Windows Autopilot allows a business to register their Windows 10 PC’s to be associated as a corporate asset, using a GUID key generated based upon Serial and Hardware key. Just a sidenote, changing the motherboard of a device will require it to be enrolled again into Autopilot.

Autopilot will inform:

1. The device is owned by the business as far of Windows is concerned
2. The device requires a business username to login
3. The device is automatically enrolled in your Device Management Solution (Intune for example)

Now you may be thinking how does this process help me provision a device for a user? Well Autopilot follows the below workflow which ensures the device is Joined to Azure AD and enrolled in your Mobile Device Management.

This workflow automation enables device provisioning where devices don’t need an IT-tech to setup because the system will do it automatically. Once the device has your Device Management installed, it’s up to the policies and configuration setup in MDM to finish the job.