MobileIron is awesome, but it doesn’t have real group policy or extra Windows 10 desktop management features. Watch this video and learn how to use PolicyPak to deliver REAL Group Policy settings and PolicyPak’s extra settings to all your MobileIron MDM joined Windows 10 machines.

 

PolicyPak and MobileIron MDM

Hi. This is Jeremy Moskowitz, former Group Policy MVP and Founder of PolicyPak Software. In this video, I’m going to show you how you can take your real Group Policy settings or your PolicyPak settings and get them deployed using your MobileIron MDM service.

If you have real Windows Group Policy settings like “Security Settings,” “Security Options,” “User Rights Assignment,” “Audit Policy,” any of these really complex security settings or “Firewall” settings or most Group Policy “Preferences” items or any of the “PolicyPak” settings not to mention all the 3,000 “Administrative Templates” settings that you might want to manage here, you can take just about every stinking policy setting that you can possibly imagine, export it as an XML, and then wrap them up as an MSI that you can then deploy using MobileIron.

Ialready have a bunch of XMLs ready to go here. I have one that will use “PolicyPak Application Settings Manager” and manage the heck out of “winzip.” I have one that will configure our “screensaver-settings.” That’s using PolicyPak Admin Templates Manager which hooks into “Microsoft Group Policy Admin Templates.” I have one that will do what’s called our “PolicyPak Browser Router” that will, if you’re in the wrong browser, get you to the right browser.

I have one that will run an application with elevated rights. If you have an application that won’t let you bypass the UAC prompt, we can do that by elevating the rights using “PolicyPak Least Privilege Manager.” We can also deploy Group Policy Preferences “shortcut” items or just about every other “Microsoft Group Policy Preferences” item and also “Microsoft Group Policy Security Settings” where you can rename a “guest-account.”

So we’re doing a lot, and we’ve got it all wrapped up into this little MSI file. How do you wrap them up? We have an included support utility called the “PolicyPak Exporter Utility.” You simply create your own GPO from the ground up, export the settings as XML, wrap that thing up into an MSI and you’re ready to go.

What’s next? Over in MobileIron land, we actually have to get three things over into MobileIron land. The three things are the “PolicyPak Client-Side Extension.” This is the thing that does actual work. Without this, PolicyPak does nothing.

Then the second thing is the PolicyPak Licenses. Without this, the PolicyPak Client-Side Extension will do nothing. You’re license file may look just like this (“PP-licenses-for-Mobileiron5”) or it may have a slightly different name, but basically you can see these are both MSIs that we give you to upload.

Then lastly, the “PolicyPak-XML-Examples,” we have XML examples for you to download right now or if you want to create your own, you’re welcome to do that too. Let’s take a look at what you have to do in MobileIron Land in order to get started with this. It’s very, very simple.

All you need to do is click on “Apps,” click on “Add” here and you’re going to add what’s called “In-House” apps. That’s kind of hiding down over here. You’re going to add these three things in. The first thing we’re going to add in is the “PolicyPak Client-Side Extension.” We’ll go ahead and click “Open” here. It’s not in that catalog already. Here we are. We’re uploading the file, and there we go.

Now once you upload an MSI to MobileIron, from time to time for some reason it won’t actually show you the “MSI product code,” which is kind of a pain in the neck. In order to get around that, we provide a little utility for you. I’ll show you how this works. We provide it in “PolicyPak Extras” and it’s called the “MIS Product Code Output Tool.”

You just simply touch an MSI file, for instance, I’m going to touch the “PolicyPak Client-Side Extension x64.” There’s the “Product Code.” I’ll copy it right there, and then I’ll go into MobileIron and I will paste it in right like that. Very simple to do. We provide that for free for you.

You have to give it a “Category” here. It doesn’t matter. You can call this desktop utilities, whatever you want. I’m just going to call it “Policypak.” We’ll go ahead and click “Next,” and “Next” past that. There’s nothing you need to do there.We’re going to deploy this to “Everyone.” Go ahead and click “Next” here.

Now what you also need to do here is in the “App Configurations” category here, you’re going to click on “Install Application configuration settings” and specify to “Silently install on Windows devices.” Once you’ve done that, you have locked and loaded the first thing you need to do, which is the “PolicyPak Client-Side Extension.”

I’m going to pause the video here and then have done this exact same procedure for the License file and also the Example file. So hang tight and give me a quick second. Okay, that didn’t take me too long. Now I have all three of these guys locked and loaded in there and ready to go. In this example, I deployed it to every computer. So therefore, as soon as they join the service, after some time it should come down, install these guys and we should see the result.

What I’m going to do is go over to my Windows 10 machine here and I’m going to join the MDM service here. Let’s go ahead and say “[email protected].” Here’s the “Letter from MobileIron” I got as the example user. It told me when prompted, to run this from a browser to then tell me what to put here in the server. Let me go ahead and do that.

This is “MobileIron” here saying here’s your “Server” address. Copy that guy right there and put it in there. Let’s give it the “Password.” Okay, registration has begun. It’s doing everything we have to do, and it says it’s almost ready to go.

You can sometimes accelerate things if you want to by clicking here and typing “mdm” again and if you “Connect to work or school” and find where you’re connected, click “Info” and click “Sync.” Sometimes this will make it happen a little faster. Sometimes it doesn’t do much at all. What I’ll do is I’ll stop the camera, and then I’ll come back when I see that it’s all installed. So I’ll close this out, and I’ll see you in a minute.

Okay, at this point, we are now registered with the MDM service. PolicyPak has deployed this nifty Group Policy Preferences item. Let’s show some other real Policy settings that it has deployed also. We’re going to take a look at my “Settings” here and then take a look at my “Lock screen settings.” PolicyPak has actually deployed real Group Policy settings. The “Screen saver settings” here are coming down through the PolicyPak Examples right there.

If we also were to take a look at “gpedit.msc” here, we can see that real Group Policy has been affected on the computer side Windows “Security Settings.” If we take a look at “Local Policies/Security Options,” PolicyPak has renamed the guest account. You can see here that it’s dictated and can’t be changed.

All these settings, all real Group Policy settings, real Group Policy Preferences and all of PolicyPak settings can be wrapped up into an MSI file, uploaded to your MobileIron service and then downloaded through the MDM channel. And just like that, you’re deploying real Group Policy settings and PolicyPak settings through MobileIron.

I hope this helps you out. If you’re looking to get started, just give us a buzz and we can give you the bits and you can bang on it yourself.

Thanks so much, and we’ll talk to you soon.