Windows AutoPilot is system management without the servers. Similar to Microsoft’s InTune or SCCM, Windows AutoPilot can be used to manage devices. It requires Azure AD and some cloud-based services but the result is you can configure and tweak your devices and recover/reconfigure them quite easily without the infrastructure costs associated with a traditional SCCM multi-site deployment architecture.
Current capabilities of AutoPilot are:
> Automatically join devices to Azure AD
> Auto-enroll devices into MDM services, such as Microsoft Intune (requires an Azure AD Premium subscription: https:/ / docs. microsoft. com/ en- us/windows/ deployment/ windows- 10- auto- pilot#prerequisites)
> Restrict the administrator account creation
> Create and auto-assign devices to configuration groups based on a device’s profile
> Customize Out of Box Experience (OOBE) content specific to the organization
The key item OOBE is tweaking. This is a bit of work done by enterprises now with SCCM or MDT to tweak the installation of Windows on devices. But now it’s cloud-based here with AutoPilot (with of course an Azure AD Premium subscription, whatever that cost may be).
In a way, this will, perhaps eventually, make deployment-specialized IT professionals worry about their long-term survivability and with good cause. Fewer Exchange Server administrators remain compared to 10 years ago. Similar too will be deployment engineers, I believe.
Packaging apps and tweaking unattend.xml files will be going away I should think. Best to get prepared now. As this is a somewhat new offering at the time of writing, little else can be said about it, other than be prepared for easy deployments versus more traditional ones that require a bit more planning and infrastructure.