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Endpoint & Device Management

Managing machines nobody is going to walk to — from Systems Management Server pushed to remote hospital sites in 1997 to Intune across a 6,500-endpoint municipal estate.

Also known as Intune, Microsoft Intune, MDM, Mobile Device Management, SMS, Systems Management Server, Desktop Engineering, Endpoint Lifecycle, Imaging

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 7 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

The estate’s endpoints are the part of it that is furthest away, most numerous, and in the hands of people with other jobs. Every generation of this problem has the same shape: how do you change ten thousand machines you cannot visit, without breaking the work being done on them?

The tooling changes, the problem does not

1996, CompuCom. The rollout method for deploying workstations in the thousands across Prudential’s estate with very little resource — a repeatable process applied at scale, which is the same problem as automation before there were tools for it.

1997, StorComm. Systems Management Server pushed out to remote hospital sites, centrally managing machines in facilities nobody was going to drive to. Alongside it, lead desktop support across NT 3.51 and 4.0, Windows 95 and 3.x, OS/2 and Novell, and an asset management system built to track what was where.

The City of Jacksonville. A 6,500-endpoint estate across 220-plus locations and six independently governed agencies — and Microsoft Intune proved against those conditions before it was recommended, deployed alongside desktop engineering, carried through change governance, and handed to the team who would run it.

Why the handover is the deliverable

An endpoint platform is not finished when it works. It is finished when the people who did not choose it can operate it, which is a different and later milestone.

That is also where the honest limit of this entry sits. The architecture, the pilot, the deployment and the training were mine; the day-to-day console was the desktop team’s, by design. A recommendation an architect has not personally tested is an opinion with a logo on it — but a platform the architect will not hand over is a hobby.

The governance half

Endpoint change is the highest-blast-radius change in most estates, because it reaches every desk at once and the people it reaches cannot roll it back. Which is why this sits under change governance rather than under infrastructure: the change process, the control gate and the question of what a bad push costs matter more here than the configuration does.

Applied in

  • Proving Products Before Recommending Them2010–2024A standing part of the architecture function rather than an occasional exercise — pilot against the estate's own conditions, then hand it over with the operators trained.
  • Citrix Published Application Estate2005–2023Eighteen years, five platform generations and roughly 4,000 billed seats — with a per-seat price an agency could argue with.
  • The Virtual Desktop Position2011–2023A decade of evaluation whose deliverable was a refusal — two platforms piloted and closed by change order, and an objection that held for eight years.
  • The SHA-2 Migration That Reached Dispatch2014A routine certificate renewal that broke a live estate through its oldest endpoints, stopped station alerting in seventy-plus fire stations, and was resolved by deliberately keeping one service weak.

See also

Also searched as

  • UEM
  • MDM
  • unified endpoint management
  • device management
  • patch management