I have noticed as a consultant and full-time employee that there seems to be a trend for companies to move to Microsoft 365 from Google Workspaces and on-prem. Generally, this has benefits for most companies I have worked with.
No, I am not trying to sell Microsoft 365. Each company may have unique requirements and a blanket approach isn’t helpful for everyone. However with that said, every company that I have worked with seems to convince itself that Microsoft 365 is the way to go.
One of the things that I specialize in is endpoint management. That means things like MDMs like Intune, Airwatch, Jamf, and so on. For the last several years people have been moving to Intune even using things like Jamf. Now I love Jamf and for Macs, it makes a lot of sense. However, the problem that companies have with it is that Jamf experts are sometimes hard to find, and because it can be so customized it can take a great deal of experience to get it to work in the way a company wants. Intune promises that you can use your Microsoft skills and not have that kind of investment in the Jamf way.
Is this true? Yes and no. It would be unfair to say that Intune does everything as well as Jamf. Jamf does some things better than Intune. Will those matter to your organization? I can’t answer that. I can say that Intune is constantly getting new features, but Jamf has years of third-party products as well and I can’t identify all the pros/cons in this post. What I will say is that for me, these are the two best ways to manage mac computers and if you have Windows computers then it is understandable why management may want to standardize on one platform like Intune.
Microsoft has done a better job becoming cloud friendly than Apple has. Apple should have had everything Intune is and more. They should have bought Jamf and been more aggressive in this space. Apple does many things well, but they don’t understand how much their computers are preferred now in business. It was a missed opportunity for sure. Hopefully, things will improve but right now I don’t see a clear winner between Jamf and Intune. I don’t have a dog in the race, just like using both of these systems so much.
Macs are growing in business, and I think that within 20 years Windows will be the minority operating system. Linux and Mac are the real players now.