Many companies have not only a standard service, where not all PCs have the same configuration profiles, standard apps,… have. Specialized services are often needed to meet the needs of different business areas. You can copy the configuration profiles and give them the name of the service so you know which policy belongs to which service or you can use the policy sets to build own services.
What are policy sets?
Policy sets are a collection of different management objects and apps that can be grouped and assigned together; if you later need to troubleshoot what reaches a specific endpoint, you can also get assignments of a device via PowerShell. The policy set is a reference to different objects you added. This feature was introduced at the end of 2019. More information can be found in the Microsoft documentation.
What can be included in a policy set collection?
These following objects can be added to policy sets:
- Apps
- App configuration policies
- App protection policies
- Device configuration profiles
- Device compliance policies
- Device type restrictions
- Windows autopilot deployment profiles
- Enrollment status page
Where can I find the policy sets
How can I create a policy set
- Click on Policy sets -> Policy sets
- Click Create
- Enter a name
A wizard guides you through the next steps. For this you have the following selection:
Application Management
- Apps
- App configuration policies
- App protection policies
Device Management — for example compliance related configurations like a custom compliance script.
- Device configuration profiles
- Device compliance policies
Device enrollment
- Device type restrictions
- Windows autopilot deployment profiles
- Enrollment status pages
- After that you can still assign the policy set. Unfortunately no assignment filters work here.
- Click Next: Review + create
- Click Create
By creating the policy set, a new section “Assignment via policy sets” appears in the configuration profile. These assignments can also be combined with smart device groups for wave deployment to roll out configurations step by step.
Conclusion
Policy sets is a cool feature to get more order in the assignments. This helps e.g. to create new device classes or to group the services of different departments e.g. Security, Office, OS…
Stay healthy, Cheers
Jannik